It's easy to say things are obsolete when you are your own publisher (Victor, Wolfram, Perez) or when can suggest your favorite (even if it's very cool) approach (Jupyter Notebooks) as a potential key solution. If you can't be your own publisher, it's a much more difficult proposition.
We're trying to figure out how to facilitate taxonomists publishing their own taxon pages, i.e. species descriptions, from a science 250+ years old. Our MVP use case is ~20k pages, one per species, for one project. There will be many of these projects, though maybe not many with 20k pages, and some with much greater than 20k pages. Updates are needed with as little latency as possible with data from from multiple sources. There has to be basically zero cost to serve these (I know, nothing is free). Sites must be trivially configurable (e.g. clone a GH template repo and edit a YAML file and some markdown). Even if we can get this in infrastructure in place we then have to figure out how to get the social structure in place to have this type of product recognized as equivalent to traditional on paper publishing, i.e. advance people's careers because they "published".
In my field, until we give people the power to publish on their own, I don't see traditional publishing go away. Many in the past have indeed published (traditionally) their own species descriptions on their own dime, meeting the rules within the various international codes of nomenclature. I also don't have a problem with dead wood- if we go digital too fast we will loose so much for any number of reasons associated with the ephemeral nature of electron-based infrastructures.
We're trying to figure out how to facilitate taxonomists publishing their own taxon pages, i.e. species descriptions, from a science 250+ years old. Our MVP use case is ~20k pages, one per species, for one project. There will be many of these projects, though maybe not many with 20k pages, and some with much greater than 20k pages. Updates are needed with as little latency as possible with data from from multiple sources. There has to be basically zero cost to serve these (I know, nothing is free). Sites must be trivially configurable (e.g. clone a GH template repo and edit a YAML file and some markdown). Even if we can get this in infrastructure in place we then have to figure out how to get the social structure in place to have this type of product recognized as equivalent to traditional on paper publishing, i.e. advance people's careers because they "published".
In my field, until we give people the power to publish on their own, I don't see traditional publishing go away. Many in the past have indeed published (traditionally) their own species descriptions on their own dime, meeting the rules within the various international codes of nomenclature. I also don't have a problem with dead wood- if we go digital too fast we will loose so much for any number of reasons associated with the ephemeral nature of electron-based infrastructures.