The end is near O.O

I was wondering how long it will take until something like this shows up.

A common discussion topic in our group is the future of scientific publishing. My boss, who profited a lot from the current system, believes that things should continue this way, with a "story driven format". As in, you do experiments after experiments in your lab until you have a "story" to tell. And then you package all those data to make a nice story and publish it as such.

I think that this approach will die out. It is inefficient and a lot of stuff is cherry-picked to fit your current beliefs. What happens, you get only part of the data, part of the "actual story". Things that do not fit your argument, or even contradict it, are swept under the rug or simply ignored. A better approach, in my opinion, would be a "by experiment" approach. You basically plan an experiment based on previous data, declare that you are doing it, do the experiment, and publish the results. Rinse and repeat. At the end,you can write a story, if you like. It will serve scientific communication, but not your experts and colleages. They know whats happening anyway.

His main argument against such an approach is that we would flood the scientific world with tidbits of information that is incoherent. We need to put things into a story for people to remember and process it.

True, people need that. Not computers with powerful algorithms.

I am kinda stocked and scared about this.