Modern science produces massive amounts of data whose visualization translate poorly in a static format. Interactive visualization that allows readers to hover over values and zoom in/out graphs help identifying outliers among a large number of data points or detecting anomalies in time series plots. Since every modern scientist is essentially a data scientist, a tool like Plotly becomes an invaluable tool for research visualization that can be incorporated into a HTML based research article.
It is apparent that the two-dimensional file formats dominating scientific publishing (the PDF "paper") compound such issues, and that journals need to enable more interactive publications to truly support scientists in presenting and publishing the reported results. It is time to bring scientific content and format to the same speed and level of progress.