Organization and management scholars’ technological conservatism: Could we free ourselves from the shackles of paper-bound logic?

Abstract

Despite capitalizing on many new possibilities offered by the digital revolution, our research community still remains bound by the 17th-century technology of research results reporting. Our work can progress faster and achieve greater impact within and beyond academia if we replace the one-package manuscript form, born three hundred years ago, with a full package that takes advantage of everything digital technology has to offer. However, the switch from paper-bound to digitally enabled logic will not be easy as our thinking and practices have been formed by decades of honing skills that bring success in the current conventions.

The community of organization and management scholars has been eager to use new technology with the potential to advance the quality, pace, and reach of our research. We have made inroads into conducting crowdsourced research online, analyzing big data originating from newly developed types of sensors, using social media to promote our research and discuss its meaning, and—more recently—meeting and teaching online on a daily basis, even when not by choice. However, our core technology of reporting research results stays rooted in a technological paradigm established three centuries ago, despite fast digital transformation occurring in other branches of science. In this essay, I ask how this conservatism affects the advancement and impact of management and organization studies in order to promote debate on how to liberate ourselves from the shackles of paper-bound logic.

“Insert Figure 1 here”

Let us start with a small illustration of our odd attachment to paper-bound technology. Imagine that you are submitting your latest manuscript to a top journal in the field. A quick look at the submission guidelines tells you that you should submit tables and figures as separate files and suggest their positioning in the text with placeholders, like the eponymous “insert Figure 1 here.” Some would argue that use of such placeholders helps reviewers evaluate and comment on your manuscript.

However, do you not find it odd that, in all published materials—from nursery rhymes to textbooks on quantum physics and management papers in their final form—graphical content is placed next to the text that references it, as if it is somehow easier to comprehend the message that way? So why do we ask reviewers to scroll 30 pages to see the table and then scroll 30 pages back to continue reading, repeating this process for each table and figure, perhaps multiple times? Sometimes reviewers inspect tables and figures only after they read the main body of the text, which can lead to misunderstandings, as any author can attest.

The reason for this convention is rooted in an outdated printing technology that most large publishers abandoned about 30 years ago. You can get a hint by poring over submission guidelines in journals published before the 1990s. They asked authors to submit figures on separate sheets of paper (remember, no electronic submission was available back then) “in a camera-ready format.” The old printing technology required the printer to take a photograph of a figure or a table (hence, the “camera-ready” requirement) and then insert the resulting film negative into the printing plates used to produce the final publication. This process required that any figure be on a separate sheet of paper and not adjacent to any text.

Such technology is no longer in use. All material is submitted electronically, and all print setup (desktop publishing) is done using specialized software that eliminates any need to take pictures of tables and figures. Publishers who host our journals have no problems allowing journals from other sciences to insert graphical content into the main text, but management journals have been slow to update this practice, suggesting that discipline-specific conventions, rather than technological obstacles, stand in the way of change.

This vignette introduces the focal issue of this essay. Although we embrace many new digitally enabled technologies in our research, the technology we employ for writing up research results still rests on paper-bound logic, just like the figure-placement requirement. I argue that our reliance on the old technology of reporting research results and the associated logic limits our impact within and beyond academia, slows down the research process, and reduces the chances to achieve greater transparency.

The “proper” form of the academic paper, or how we all are 17th-century gentlemen

Whereas the issue of a figure’s placement can be seen as peripheral to the advancement and impact of management and organizations studies, the old paper-bound technology also shapes the form of our articles. On the face of it, the typical management paper has changed quite a lot since the inception of modern management research. Our reports originally focused on empirical results, with little discussion of theory; today, the theory, methods, and discussion sections have expanded dramatically while the results section has contracted (Strang and Siler, 2017). The length of papers has also changed dramatically. The average publication in the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) increased in length threefold, extending from 9 pages in the 1970s to 27 pages in the 2020s. No articles of 20 pages or more were published in the 1970, but 70 such papers were published in the 2020. Once you consider that AMJ’s pages are currently filled with denser print and use a two-column layout, the increase in the length of papers is even more evident.

Yet despite such changes, we still operate within the same technologically determined paradigm of research reporting, which assumes that an academic paper needs to constitute a self-contained universe delivered in one package (Reid, 2010). This premise is rooted in the old and increasingly obsolete technology of research results dissemination. When academic journals came to be in the 17th century (Banks, 2017), the only way to disseminate research articles was to send them by post to subscribers. The article had to contain all relevant details because accessing any additional material required the reader to contact the original author by post and hope for an answer.

Thanks to the internet, this limitation no longer applies and other branches of science are increasingly capitalizing on the opportunities created by digital technologies. The general description of the study and the most important results are delivered in the main body of the article, whereas the remaining material is presented in online supplements. This approach seems to deliver the best of both worlds. Articles are shorter, thereby increasing the chances that they will be read in their entirety and comprehended. At the same time, given that the internet has no top capacity, there is no limit on the size of supplementary materials, so the description of methods and results can contain even the most minute details, impossible to cover in one-package articles. Importantly, the supplementary materials do not need to be text-only; all kinds of “data” are possible, including images, videos, and audio recordings.

Consider the 2015 Science article on the reproducibility problem in psychological science (Open Science Collaboration, 2015) as an example: it is 8 pages long (including two tables, three figures, and the list of names of over 200 authors) but the main text is accompanied by 26 pages of supplements while the full data behind the article, consisting of thousands of pages, are available in the Open Science Framework repository. The paper garnered 3035 Web of Science and 5970 Google Scholar citations in just 5 years. More importantly, it brought about methodological revelations and affected the entire psychological research program, while also reverberating in hundreds of articles in the popular press. Apparently, 35 pages of dense narration in one package are not necessary to make a difference.

I argue that the failure to engage with opportunities extended by the new digitally enabled logic impairs the development of the discipline and reduces our impact within and beyond academia. The remaining parts of this essay aim to spark a conversation on how we could liberate ourselves from the shackles of paper-bound logic and exploit all the opportunities extended by digitally enabled logic.

Limits of paper-bound logic

The central premise of paper-bound logic—rooted in the 17th-century mode of disseminating articles by post—maintains that everything that matters needs to be included in the main manuscript, and more importantly, anything that cannot be fit into the main manuscript does not matter. I argue that both parts of this premise have held back the development of our discipline. The first one results in increasingly lengthy papers focused on one audience only, whereas the second causes us to be hesitant in taking advantage of opportunities extended by ubiquitous internet access. Just as with figure placement, the opportunities arising due to the new technology are missed not because of any practical obstacles, but due to these deeply ingrained beliefs resulting from the decades-long reign of paper-bound logic in our discipline.

There is no denying that the paper-bound self-contained-universe form has some advantages and served us well for more than 70 years. Primarily, it is a form that we are skillful at using. Years of practice allow us to write a new paper without much soul-searching on what should be included or how to present an argument. Universal familiarity with the form also means that reaching out to other scholars for advice on writing and adjusting a manuscript is easy. Finally, the form simultaneously allows for and requires a significant level of story control. We need to impose the storyline on material collected, as we are aware that the rich, multifaced organizational reality can be interpreted in countless ways. The 17th-century technology allows for developing only one storyline in the paper, making the reduction of the multifaced reality into one neat story not only possible, but also unavoidable.

However, the limitations of the paper-bound form and the associated logic are becoming increasingly salient with the proliferation of digital technology and changes in other areas of academic research. The form is focused on one audience only and designed for one use-case only; it is bound to get increasingly lengthy, while slowing the adoption of open science practices. Finally, it undermines our public image and may be seen as at least a little off by younger generations of scholars.

The self-contained manuscript is intended to be an exchange in conversation between scholars heavily invested in the study of a given topic. From this perspective, the form is quite an efficient means of communication among members of the core community, troubles with transparency notwithstanding. However, it is likely that any given article is read (or skimmed) more often by scholars who do not belong to the core community than by those who do. The current form does very little to help non-core audiences understand the article’s message, resulting in misunderstandings and mis-citations.

The one-package manuscript is also designed for one use-case only. Readers must read it in its entirety to obtain a good grasp of what has been found and how. However, the reality of science consumption, as I discuss later, suggests that this is just one use-case among many.

Furthermore, as already suggested, the one-package form is bound to increase in length—likely beyond reasonable values—for two major reasons. Theories develop and methods advance, allowing for increasingly complex study designs; thus, more pages have to be spent on their discussion. Furthermore, new expectations resulting from the open science movement require us to report more to ensure the trustworthiness (Pratt et al., 2020) and reproducibility of our studies (Aguinis et al., 2018). These new requirements, such as using tables to ensure trustworthiness in qualitative research (Cloutier and Ravasi, 2021) and being more open, detailed, and reflexive about the research process to ensure rigor (Grodal et al., 2021), are likely to increase the length of papers even further, resulting in a greater share of scholars skipping large parts of the manuscript.

At the same time, achieving the newly prescribed transparency levels is difficult when operating within the paper-bound logic for two reasons. First, the logic suggests that anything that does not fit into the main manuscript is of secondary importance, which likely constitutes one of the many reasons why management and organization studies are slow to adopt open science practices (Hensel, 2021; Tenney et al., 2021). When the main manuscript is the only thing that matters, the requirement to provide additional data, codes, and protocols can be seen as a nuisance hard to justify. Why waste time sharing resources perceived as unimportant not just by authors, but also by the paper’s readers, who are bound by the same logic? Second, although the average manuscript’s length is increasing, editors still impose limits on the page count to avoid publishing book-length articles. Thus, paradoxically, we are asked to report more while simultaneously keeping within page limits that do not allow us to report more.

The failure to employ new technology for research-related data sharing can be also detrimental to our public image because it indicates that we are inherently slow to change. There is a deep irony in describing the adoption, development, and use of new technologies in organizations with technology reliant on text-only means born in the 17th century. Likewise, when we study transparency, accountability, and openness—an increasingly prominent topic in organization studies (Heimstädt and Dobusch, 2020)—without taking any action to ensure the transparency of our research by providing readers access to data in all possible forms, we are undermining our cause.

Furthermore, scholarship—as practiced until very recently—was ultimately based on trust in the ethics of scholars as nothing but ethical norms prevent them from doctoring the data and results or even inventing numbers and quotations from thin air. Unlike in experimental sciences, the possibility of external verification in the form of replication research is limited. However, that trust seems to be eroding, along with trust toward other institutions. Ubiquitous internet access and the potential availability of data in a few clicks, combined with the general public’s increased average education, have created a new attitude toward scientific results. Recipients of scientific claims now expect to be offered a chance to inspect the data behind such claims, even if they do not plan to actually use them. The Royal Society’s maxim “Nullius in verba” (“take nobody’s word for it”) is finally being practiced at the societal level, but our attachment to paper-bound logic makes us slow to notice the change.

Finally, our infatuation with paper-bound form can be somewhat perplexing to younger generations of scholars, who were born when the hypertext of loosely connected resources already reigned. Technological progress makes the very notion of “paper” increasingly obsolete, but we fail to see it. This may result in younger scholars’ conviction that the management and organizations research community is rigid and slow to change and that more impactful work can be performed in commercial organizations that put a higher premium on interesting results instead of valuing duly compliance with an outdated form.

Going forward: liberating ourselves from paper-bound logic

Once we stop believing that a self-contained paper is the sole product of our research, we can employ digitally enabled technologies to our advantage. In contrast to paper-bound logic, the fundamental assumption of digitally enabled logic maintains that all information can be accessed at all times. This assumption—likely seeming trivial to younger generations of scholars—brings immense consequences for the mode of knowledge consumption, but has not been reflected in the mode of knowledge production in our discipline.

It is not a mere coincidence that the internet is ruled by hypertext—namely, texts with links to other resources that link to still other texts and resources, together creating the web. That design facilitates diverse uses of information while giving the recipient control of the process. The trick is to exploit the potential of ubiquitous information access without falling into a trap of creating one more inscrutable bundle of loosely associated assets. I argue that this is achievable by creating digitally enabled full packages.

Such a package would be composed of three elements that together are more likely to reach broader audiences, facilitating the research process and knowledge accumulation. The first element is the main text, with a structure similar to the current form—but no longer based on the paper-bound self-contained-universe logic—and, thus, significantly shorter. The shortening would occur due to moving the minute description of methods, non-essential discussion of theory, supporting tables, additional analyses, robustness checks, and thorough discussion of limitations to supplementary materials—which constitute the second part of the package—while having them only signaled in the main manuscript. Importantly, in line with digitally enabled logic, such relegation does not mean that those parts of the manuscript do not matter, but rather that they are unlikely to be read by the majority of readers, who are either time-pressed or recruited from outside the core audience for a given article.

The second part of the package would also contain all kinds of other supporting materials, including data sets, code, images, and audio and video recordings, creating new opportunities for quantitative and qualitative scholars alike. Finally, the package would also contain a short, two-journal-page long synopsis of research (about 1200 words). The synopsis would have the same structure of the main manuscript (introduction, theory, methods, results, discussion), rather than simply announcing the content like abstracts tend to do. It should also use a simpler language accessible to scholars not heavily invested in a given research topic and should preferably contain the most important results presented in graphical form as readers tend to focus on figures first.

I argue that the full-package form would generate significant benefits, including faster literature review and integration, a higher quality of research, increased transparency, the opening up of new avenues, and greater chances of reaching practitioners through intermediaries.

Facilitating faster review of literature

The annual production of management papers quadrupled between 2000 and 2020, with more than 120 papers appearing daily in Web of Science-listed management journals alone. The first benefit of adopting a full-package form is facilitating faster and more accurate surveying of literature, allowing for dealing with the dramatic increase in the number of published articles and existing literature. This can be achieved when we realize that reviewing literature is as much an elimination as an accumulation process. The present form supports only the latter—that is, when you find a relevant paper, the one-package form delivers a fairly useful description of results, even if it typically lacks transparency. However, the annual increase in the number of papers means that we need to ensure that the elimination process is facilitated too, as scholars inspect thousands of articles annually but use only dozens in their work. We can save considerable time when false hits are identified and rejected faster. Synopses and shorter papers are supposed to achieve exactly that. Nothing is gained when you read 30 pages only to realize that it is not what you need. Arriving at the same conclusion after reading two pages is likely to save time that can be devoted to the more studious reading of the relevant articles.

Ensuring quality of research by dealing with TL;DR syndrome

As already indicated, the main problem of the current form of the academic article in our discipline is its focus on one audience only—namely, the core community for a given research topic. However, the academic audience also comprises two other subsets: scholars who have a general interest in a topic but never study it in detail and other researchers who encounter a paper simply because they need a citation supporting their larger argument in another area of study or even in another discipline. By definition, these two subsets of academic audience are significantly larger than the core community, and they are likely responsible for a fair share of citations of the article.

Data collected by services such as SCITE_ and Semantic Scholar suggest that between 80% and 90% of article citations are made in passing, without any further engagement with the argument or result reported in the cited article. It seems likely that a significant share of these citations come from the two mentioned subsets of the audience. However, the current version of our manuscripts does very little to help those scholars understand the core message of the study. Being rational, they likely reduce their time spent on reading literature that is not central to their research. Thus, when they encounter a long paper, they are unlikely to read it in full. The computer science community has an acronym for it: TL;DR, which stands for “too long; didn’t read.” However, research quality is negatively affected when scholars cite an article without having even a cursory grasp of what it says.

The synopsis that summarizes the entire paper, including the results, is meant to help these two audiences get a better grasp of the article’s content. This is likely to achieve two goals: increasing the number of relevant citations from scholars who read the synopsis and/or the shorter manuscript and reducing the number of irrelevant citations by scholars who read the synopsis and realized it was not what they thought it was.

Many scholars may balk at the proposition of preparing such synopses, which can be perceived as similar to Reader’s Digest summaries of “War and Peace”—good for busy people, but not for serious literary buffs. However, the data on the reception of academic articles, as scarce as such data are, suggest that a significant share of scholars often behave like busy people—at least when citing literature not central to their research topic. Some estimates put the share of scholars who cite a paper without ever reading it at 80% (Simkin and Roychowdhury, 2002) whereas other research shows that a paper can be cited hundreds of times even when the paper never existed (Harzing, 2017). Numerous studies have indicated that authors continue to cite work that has been retracted (Bar-Ilan and Halevi, 2017; Craig et al., 2020; Furman et al., 2012). Given that retractions are clearly indicated in retracted articles, such research again suggests that a significant share of citing authors never read the cited paper. This is only to be expected, as nobody can be forced to read 30 pages of text—specific exceptions like participation in a doctoral program notwithstanding—when feverish pace of publishing is the norm (Berg and Seeber, 2018). Furthermore, a recent study has shown that management scholars do not find management papers particularly enjoyable to read (Dane and Rockmann, 2021), likely negatively impacting the number of people who read papers in their entirety.

I suggest that instead of turning our backs on busy scholars and non-core audiences, we should work to ensure the increased chances of proper understanding of the article message. There will always be scholars who cite a paper on the basis of the title alone, but the goal of the proposed change is to reduce, rather that eliminate, the prevalence of such practice.

Increasing transparency

The open science movement is making significant inroads in other areas of science (Christensen et al., 2019), but we have been slow to adopt its guidelines (Hensel, 2021; Tenney et al., 2021). Certainly, there are many reasons for this, ranging from the high costs of sharing data sets that took years to compile to difficulties in de-identifying study participants and legal issues associated with the ownership of proprietary data. However, as suggested, we are likely unwilling to share data and code also due to the main assumption of paper-bound logic: whatever does not fit into main manuscript is deemed unimportant. Adopting digitally enabled logic is likely to facilitate an increase in the transparency of our research.

This is likely to bring several non-trivial benefits. The current practice of reporting makes the majority of research in our discipline impossible to reproduce (reanalyze based on the information provided in the journal article) (Bergh et al., 2017; Hofman et al., 2021). Likewise, research in management and organization studies is perceived as less likely to replicate than work in other social sciences, such as economics, political science, and sociology (Gordon et al., 2020). The use of questionable research practices such as p-hacking (using researcher degrees of freedom to obtain “significant” results) (Simmons et al., 2011) and HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known) (Kerr, 1998) is believed to be widespread in our discipline (Baum and Bromiley, 2019; Bedeian et al., 2010). Ensuring the more frequent sharing of supporting materials is likely to help address at least some of those issues, thereby enabling us to deal with the credibility crisis we are facing (Byington and Felps, 2017).

Greater transparency is likely to bring additional benefits, including in the training of new generations of scholars and advancements in the accumulation of results. The former could be significantly improved when graduate students have the ability to easily reproduce a study they were asked to read. Running the associated code on the data posted to a public repository could constitute a great training opportunity while simultaneously contributing to better understanding what the results really mean and how certain they are. Presently, the published results gain almost a sacred status (Bliese and Wang, 2020), as whatever has been published is believed to be true. Repeating the analysis can highlight to the students the fragility of results to even the slightest change in the analysis or operationalization of variables (Schweinsberg et al., 2021).

Greater transparency would also allow for the faster and more accurate accumulation of results. For instance, currently meta-analysts’ work is often held back by the need to reach out to the original authors for results not disclosed in the final manuscript. This obstacle is likely to be removed when all the data are presented in the supplementary files and can be recalculated when needed.

Opening new avenues

The full package is also likely to open new avenues, especially for qualitative scholars. Common usage of supplementary materials could allow for providing “data” in forms other than text, thereby making qualitative research simultaneously more interesting and trustworthy. Despite the common praise for “thick” description (Geertz, 1973), our manuscripts often do a poor job of communicating the feeling of the research site to the reader. Notice that when the early 20th-century anthropologists used textually rich descriptions as the primary tool of their trade, they did so not because it was the best device possible, but rather because no other technologies were easily available. We do not need to stay limited by the technology available in their time, lest we want to be seen by the future generations of scholars as odd luddites who failed to realize the potential of new means of description. Ironically, you will find 66 pictures in “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” (1922)—modern anthropology foundational work—even though Malinowski’s Klimax camera certainly did not fit in his pocket, like our smartphones do. Likewise, there is an irony in biologists posting research-related videos more often than we do (Gardner and Inger, 2021), even though we deal with humans and organizations—that is, more interesting subjects than cells and bacteria. Of course, using images, sound, and video recordings is associated with their own practical problems that biologists do not have to face, such as ensuring the anonymity and safety of our interviewees. However, journalists and documentary filmmakers manage to successfully deal with these challenges, and we could learn from their experiences.

Reaching practitioners

Thus far, I have focused on the full package’s benefits for the members of the academic community. However, the full package is also likely to increase our impact beyond the world of academia. Volumes have been written on practitioners’ limited engagement with results delivered by management and organization studies (Kieser et al., 2015). Thus far, we have attempted to reach practitioners directly, like in the Strategic Management Journal’s initiative to provide a second, practitioner-oriented abstract. I argue that the direct route has limited chances in succeeding as practitioners do not subscribe to our journals and have no time to spare. However, the proposed full package, and the synopsis in particular, could act as a bridge to intermediaries such as journalists, bloggers, YouTubers, and commentators. Such intermediaries are often not tied to one, cleanly delimited field of inquiry; rather, they look for attractive findings in any sciences. Thus, our papers have to compete for their attention with articles from other disciplines, which often tend to be shorter and easier to grasp. The synopsis and shorter main manuscript would improve the cost/benefit equation for such translators, increasing the chances that our work would be featured in their venues, thereby reaching practitioners. For such intermediaries, synopses may perform a similar function as press releases, produced by some universities for the research they see as worth advertising, but without the associated downsides. Press releases are usually written by public relations specialists and are intended to produce as much publicity as possible; consequently, they often overhype the findings (Yavchitz et al., 2012). Synopses would be written by authors and vetted by editors, using the same academic yardstick used in the assessment of the main text, thereby ensuring the proper representation of findings.

Challenges in adopting digitally enabled full package

Although the adoption of digitally enabled logic has the potential to bring about a range of substantial benefits, the replacement of paper-bound logic is likely to be difficult. The main obstacle seems to result from our proficiency in using paper-bound logic, as generations of scholars have been trained in the current convention and are skillful at using it. We are likely being locked in a competency trap: The high skill in representing organizational reality within the means available in the 17th century suggests that changing the convention will be difficult. The proposed adoption of the full package may appear to some as the invention of a better mousetrap—improving on something that appears to work just fine.

Furthermore, the current convention is highly institutionalized and infused with values extending beyond their technical meaning (Selznick, 1957). Writing papers according to convention amounts to not only a technical, but also a social norm. In theory, the only thing needed to, for instance, take advantage of the opportunities extended by online supplements is to write a short paper accompanied by a methods supplement and a number of audio and video recordings. However, nobody does it, meaning it is unlikely that anybody would take the risk of being seen as an outlier who does not know the “proper” way to conduct management research. Even the smallest deviation from the convention can result in rejection (Corley et al., 2021), and submitting a paper with a completely different structure practically guarantees failure. Experimenting is made even less likely by the increasingly cutthroat competition in academia and the need to secure tenure in a dwindling market for management professors. People are unlikely to experiment when their living is on the line.

What is more, the proposed new convention would require more work, which we are unaccustomed to. Authors would not only need to decide which parts of the manuscript should be moved to online supplements, but they would also have to make that decision on their own as no advice is currently readily available. Sharing data also requires additional work, as having data in a form understandable to the author is significantly different from having the same data in a form understandable to other people. Writing synopses would also be a challenge, and some people might question whether summarizing an entire paper into two pages is even possible. Freeing ourselves from the shackles of paper-bound logic would also require more editorial work as editors would need to vet the synopses, data, code, and other supplementary materials.

However, I believe that all the practical obstacles can be overcome. After some period of experimenting, a new convention suggesting which parts of the material should be moved to online supplements is likely to develop. The vetting of data and code is eventually going to happen anyway as this is what the open science movement requires (Nosek et al., 2015). Thus, it is more an issue of speeding up a change rather than introducing completely new—and, some would surely say, frivolous—requirement. The concerns regarding the feasibility of summarizing the entire paper in just two pages are, in my view, unwarranted. Note that John Nash’s Nobel-worthy paper on equilibrium in n-person games (1950) was just one page long. We hardly ever study concepts of similar complexity, so we could safely assume that synthesizing the main idea of a paper in two journal pages is possible.

The obstacle that will be the most difficult to deal with is, obviously, the institutionalization of the 17th-century convention. Thankfully, new generations of scholars may be more prone to see the limits of the current form, while the proliferation of the open science standards in other disciplines may act as an external jolt, helping to uproot the convention.

At the end of the day, freedom from paper-bound logic depends on editors to a large extent. Our field has a range of open-minded editors who are willing to take on the risk of experimenting, The Academy of Management Discoveries initiative to employ video abstracts is just one example. At least some parts of the current proposal (i.e. synopses) seem to be easy to implement, so there is hope that the proposal may become an object of experimentation. Such experiments would reveal whether synopses lead to a greater number of and more relevant citations. Even a simple analysis of server logs would reveal whether they are downloaded more often than the full articles.

Conclusions

We live in a fascinating, but also somewhat perplexing time of technological upheaval. Although we have been eager to use new methods and data sources made possible by digital technology, we still rely on the old research reporting convention as a primary mean to share our work. I have argued that this convention has reached its expiration date: Although it served us well, it is ill-suited for the incoming challenges. The proposed full package, consisting of a shorter main manuscript, supplementary materials, and synopsis, is just one among many possible avenues for exploiting the potential of the new technology. Experimentation and further discussion are needed to develop a form that would suit us best. However, the first step required is the realization that the current convention is a result of technology available three centuries ago rather than of any practical needs of the discipline. Just like in the case of figure placement, there is little benefit in clinging to an obsolete technology, but there are significant costs. It is high time to intensify our experimenting efforts.