Do standard article formats limit creativity?

The author of this post compares two different opinions about a trend resulting in increasing standardisation of journal articles. Drawing on a recent survey of forty years of research papers in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and interviews with authors, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner and his team observe an increasing homogenisation of published work. Weighing up the pros and cons of this development, they discuss whether it has enhanced or limited intellectual innovations in STS. On the contrary, Kaveh Bazargan argued, in a presentation at the NISO Conference in 2022, that using standard technology, notably XML, can increase standardization and as a result promote open science.