Making journal articles 'live': Turning academic writing into scientific dialog

Web 2.0 services and social networking offer possibilities to transform academic publishing to facilitate scientific dialogue. We present ‘The Live Paper’ in this editorial as a concept to consider how to leverage existing web technologies to produce rich, omnidirectional, and interactive narratives on research. Following the format of a traditional research report we describe and discuss how to enrich research reports utilizing various types of analytical tools, data, and web services in a published paper embedded in evolving scientific discourse. We also consider how the live papers would influence the practice, culture, and economy of academic research. We conclude that geospatial researchers have an opportunity to lead this development towards richer and more open ways of communicating our findings. The technology and infrastructure to do so exist today, but several barriers remain.