Academic writing and publishing beyond documents

Research on writing tools stopped in the late 1980s when Microsoft Word had achieved monopoly status. However, the development of the Web and the advent of mobile devices are increasingly rendering static print-like documents obsolete. In this vision paper we reflect on the impact of this development on scholarly writing and publishing. Academic publications increasingly include dynamic elements, e.g., code, data plots, and other visualizations, which clearly requires other tools for document production than traditional word processors. When the printed page no longer is the desired final product, content and form can be addressed explicitly and separately, thus emphasizing the structure of texts rather than the structure of documents. The resulting challenges have not yet been fully addressed by document engineering.