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Scientific publishing is still organized around bundles built for print. We use music’s shift from albums to streaming to argue why access and unbundling aren’t enough. Shared standards are the missing layer for reusable, trustworthy science. articles.continuousfoundation.org/articles/how...

Songs have always been unbundled, of course: radio stations, juke boxes, sheet music, individual performances, 45s, music videos. In the history of music, the album era was a relatively short interlude driven by tech advances, marketing, & groups like the Beatles en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album_era

I admit I am skeptical about unbundling science (but willing to be convinced). I'm skeptical because in my field at least (social science), it's very hard to make sense of the data without the context, i.e, the introduction and methods. With those, plus the data, you basically have a paper.

If scientific papers are less like music albums and more like statements or arguments (e.g., sentences, paragraphs, chapters), then unbundling them would be like unbundling a sentence into its words, or a paragraph into its sentences -- sometimes still meaningful, but often just a meaningless jumble

Most papers already contain multiple semi-independent units of work. A typical ~10-page paper often includes several experiments, analyses, or datasets, each with its **own** methods, assumptions, and results.