Dolomite Mountains, Trento, Italy

I am attending the First Workshop on Scientific Knowledge Creation, Dissemination and Evaluation.

The discussion is about the evolution of the scientific paper in the 21st century. There is a pretty diverse group of people attending, from accademia (computer scientists, philosophers, etc), from the industry (mainly scientific publishers), from the EU commission and random people (like me).

As usual people are split between:

those who use the past to extrapolate the future, but doing so they always come up with reasons why things cannot be done drastically differently,
visionaries who tend to discard the past, and look at which technology is available to do things differently.
People from the latter group (visionaries) are sometimes not very rational, so that their vision remains largely a dream; but a very tiny percentage of visionaries are also rational and their ideas, when implemented, can help shape the new world.