This article makes the case that "The scientific paper bundles too many functions into a single artifact, and the bundle is starting to come apart." It outlines several proposals that could replace it, for example, "an Adaptive Knowledge Network, in which the basic unit of scientific contribution is a "knowledge object" rather than a paper." But there are risks; the process of writing the paper is part of the scientific thinking that underlies this, and this might be lost. The article doesn't mention Octopus, the UK project that defines "eight publication types that are aligned with the research process," but this would fit squarely into this discussion. The major issue (in my view) with this sort of disaggregation is that every contribution is locked into the same methodology, and nothing breaks out of what might be called 'normal science' for the discipline.
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