A few comments and suggestions: Look into "Reproducible Research" methods and find ways to help more crusty scientists adopt them. Emacs Org-mode documents and IPython Notebooks are two popular ways to write a paper that you can rebuild when data or analysis is updated. Your "linear slider" concept misses the fact that scientific research results are better represented by a (humongous) directed graph of papers joined by their citations. More tools to understand and query that graph would provide real benefit to scientists and laypeople. But, any given paper, especially one following Reproducible Research methods, can be placed in version control (and often is) which effectively gives you the history (still potentially non-linear) that you describe. My (possibly faulty) understanding is that you retain copyright for your own research result materials prior to their publishing. This includes preprints and possibly even the as-submitted copy. At least as far as the publisher is concerned they only assert copyright on the copy they publish. You should be free to submit your copies to an open distributor such as arXiv.org. -Brett.