Publications Beyond Papers: The Future Is Now Supplements Are the Key to Better Understanding

Since the origins of science, researchers main output has been books and papers that describe new theoretical and practical ideas and results. These sources are useful and important, but learning from them is often not easy. How can we facilitate this learning process? A natural idea is to add all this supplementary information to the paper: slides, data, detailed motivations, detailed derivations, videos, and so on. Of course, published papers are subject to length limits, so we cannot include all the information in the paper itself. Besides, not everyone needs all of the information: a practitioner will probably be more interested in the details of an algorithm than how the corresponding formulas were derived, while a theoretician working on a similar problem may be most interested in the details of the derivation. Since we cannot place all of this additional material into the paper itself, let us place it into supplements. Therefore, a solution is to add supplements to academic papers. These supplements will make academic papers more accessible and boost the application of our ideas and techniques. Some readers may say that this is a nice vision of the future, but the IEEE is more down-to-earth. However, this is already possible, and the future is already here!