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.