Visualizing a Journal that Serves the Computational Sciences Community

Let's face it: The printed journal format that has served the scientific research community satisfactorily for more than 200 years doesn't serve the computational sciences community well at all. The community should, instead, communicate and archive the results of its research endeavors through a venue that lets students and colleagues fully examine published computational results and critique the numerical algorithms the authors used to generate them. A suitable computational sciences journal must principally reside in the digital rather than hardcopy world and, we propose, should consist of an interactive scientific visualization tool that is fully embedded within a versatile Wiki. The basic framework for such a journal already exists within the open source community. As we show here, for example, the SCI Institute's VisTrails Wiki (www.vistrails.org) provides many features that would be desirable in an interactive, visual, and archival computational sciences journal. It's impossible to effectively illustrate the advantages of an interactive, visual, and archival journal (IVAJ) over a traditional journal through a CiSE Visualization Corner article, which itself is intended principally to appear in print. Hence, to fully engage in this discussion, we encourage readers to interact with an article that we've posted in a proposed IVAJ format. We provide instructions for that interaction here; you can also find an abbreviated set of instructions at www.vistrails.org/index.php/ UserTbhline/IVAJ. Another useful reference is our May/June 2009 Visualization Corner article.1 Here we demonstrate how an IVAJ can help that published article's printed pages come alive and can considerably expand on its basic scientific content.