The internet has fundamentally changed the way researchers work and collaborate, but has had less impact on the way they publish their results. In this paper, we ask how scientific reports should be designed with the internet as the primary distribution channel in mind. We propose a concept for a multi-layer design, which is capable of including both interactive elements and a comprehensive data-layer. For the implementation, we suggest working with an output-independent format and a modular compiler to generate various output formats, most of all, HTML and PDF. The HTML-version utilizes modern web standards like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. This enables us, for example, to include interactive visualisations, raw datasets, or syntax files directly into a publication. The redesign also raises more general questions of how articles are used to facilitate scientific communication, concerning, for example, the way we cite previous work or the concept of scientific authorship in general.
