Scientific research has long been gatekept by academic behemoths. However open-source development and open education efforts have rubbed off on the space.
Research moves at a breakneck pace in fields like machine learning & deep learning. In such an environment, a culture of openness and sharing is necessary to maintain an edge. Yes, this comes with drawbacks with preprint archival sites offering experiences akin to drinking out of a firehose.
Most of the scientific literature to date has followed rigid publishing standards that weren't optimized for scalability on the modern web. Most papers are only available in PDF formats that use \(\LaTeX\).
Projects like ar5iv and arxiv-vanity aimed to combat this PDF monopoly by using \(\LaTeX\) to HTML to serve stylized webpages.
Most text+code lives in notebooks such as Jupyter, Pluto, R Markdown, & Observable.