(this is an excerpt of the paper linked below)
We would like to take the opportunity to postulate the following actions, which we think should be carried out to make the content of images in biomedical articles more accessible:
- Stop pressing diagrams into bitmaps! Unless the image only consists of one single photograph, screenshot, or another kind of picture that only has bitmap representation, vector graphics should be used for article figures.
- Let data and metadata travel from the tools that generate diagrams to the final articles! Whenever the specific tool that is used to generate the diagram "knows" that a certain graphical element refers to an organism, a gene, an interaction, a point in time, or another kind of entity, then this information should be stored in the image file, passed on, and finally published with the articl