Typically, scientific debates are published in the form of "letter to the editor" to comment on or criticize a previously published paper. Alternatively, papers within the same volume can refer to each other. In both cases the actual nature of the debate that takes place is rendered incompletely.
Are there some viable alternatives or experimental forms of publishing scientific discourse? Maybe on the level of layout and typesetting?
Some of my work involves development of international standards, on which it can be quite valuable to record the debate leading to a decision.
Originally this was done in a very ad hoc fashion, via mailing list archives and notes from meetings, then attempting to write "rationale" into the standard. We are now trying to be more intentional about recording significant debate by using a bug-tracking system on Github. The jury is still out as to whether this will really work or not, but it seems to be an improvement over not having any system in place.
caution! This Answer may only be applicable for Germany / the German intellectual style described by Johann Galtung in 1981.
I suggested my supervisor to put my dissertation into a publicly available Git repository. So she or others could peer review it at any time. Suggestions or changes can be merged or rolled back depending on my decision if to accept pull requests or not. A repository saves all the documents history and is offers absolute transparency about the contributions of others (corrected typos, named a new source and so on). Issue tracking can be used to organize open tasks (e.g. chapter needs more clarification, shorten this part, add an example ...)
She found the idea nice, but advised me to wait with experiments like this until I have received my degree with a classically published monograph.
One problem I see lies in the structure of the science community and it's particular public particular industry founded fiscal base. The system makes scientists or research groups to competitors. So no one pre-publishes works or data outside of the (mostly double blind peer reviewed) journals etc. The in-transparent and anonymous review comments that you receive mostly contain more offense than helpful constructive criticism.
The scientific discourse, as I experience it, sadly relies mainly on concurrency instead of collaboration. No one risks that another scientist or team publishes first and in doubt receives the founding they (both) applied for.
