Awesome! It would be really cool to see an overhaul of current research papers to be more suited in digital form. A static PDF with words just doesn't do justice when you can enrich research and content with animations and interactivity. Heres an excellent example: http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt...
While the graphic format you link to might be ok for novices who are reading a seminal paper on graph theory but supposedly need an illustration to explain "linear" and "all pairs" (really?). As someone familiar with the jargon I find it increadibly frustrating. I image it would take 10x longer at least to create such a document than writing the prose - not a great use of researcher's time.
In particular the lack of a solid left margin makes it hard to read. Really it's not a paper anymore, it's an infographic.
It seems considerably more wise to educate novices in the jargon, than to re-write every research paper in a novice-friendly over-illustrated manner. After all, how many graphs of "linear" do our novices really need to look at?
Hyper linking content (with a clean visual pesentation for links and displaying linked content)is the answer to the question of how much introductory/background content to put into a document. Cf wiki, especially the kind that auto-link known terms.
