> With that in mind, this development can only be a good thing. I wonder if it measurably speeds up scientific developments? If time and energy don't have to be spent rediscovering something, the more it can be spent on building on the existing knowledge instead.
It will be interesting to see. Though, in order to reap the benefits, time and energy needs to spent reading and familiarizing one's self with the older literature. An unfortunate result of the "publish or perish" culture of science today is the explosion in the number of papers being published. This makes it difficult to keep up with, and digest, the new results that are coming out. Given that, it may be difficult for people to add to that the older literature.
Certainly one could argue that understanding the old literature first is the correct way to go about it, but one cannot sacrifice an understanding of the recent literature. Papers can get dinged for only citing old results, which can have the unintended side-effect of suggesting: a) that particular topic is dead, as a field of study, or b) that the authors are unable to their work in the context of recent results, which shows a lack of knowledge of the field. So, keeping up with the current/recent literature is neceessary, and there are only so many hours in a day.
It is certainly no excuse for not knowing the older literature, but it is a realistic constraint on what can be expected.
Edit: I should add, the electronic access to old Astronomy articles has been of great help to me, and has resulted in my finding and reading older papers which are relevant to the work I am doing. It would have been much more difficult when the only way to read the papers was to find a physical copy of the journal.
Publish and perish creates more noise, especially in more mature fields. And those papers have citations, adding to the citation count. That older citations are preferred in such an environment is not very surprising.
There are plenty of dubious reasons to cite newer papers that happen in a competitive publishing environment; e.g. you might try to ingratiate yourself with the PC by citing their most recent papers (and protect yourself from stupid rejections). This further distorts the results, making citations often not a very useful measure of progress and impact (some fields are worse than others in this regard).
It will be interesting to see. Though, in order to reap the benefits, time and energy needs to spent reading and familiarizing one's self with the older literature. An unfortunate result of the "publish or perish" culture of science today is the explosion in the number of papers being published. This makes it difficult to keep up with, and digest, the new results that are coming out. Given that, it may be difficult for people to add to that the older literature.
Certainly one could argue that understanding the old literature first is the correct way to go about it, but one cannot sacrifice an understanding of the recent literature. Papers can get dinged for only citing old results, which can have the unintended side-effect of suggesting: a) that particular topic is dead, as a field of study, or b) that the authors are unable to their work in the context of recent results, which shows a lack of knowledge of the field. So, keeping up with the current/recent literature is neceessary, and there are only so many hours in a day.
It is certainly no excuse for not knowing the older literature, but it is a realistic constraint on what can be expected.
Edit: I should add, the electronic access to old Astronomy articles has been of great help to me, and has resulted in my finding and reading older papers which are relevant to the work I am doing. It would have been much more difficult when the only way to read the papers was to find a physical copy of the journal.