7 ms·

Authorea: Write research papers inside your browser

85 points by synparb 14y ago

synparb 14y ago
I'm curious how easy it's going to be to (1) download the git repo from the backend, and (2) format the articles to meet specific journal requirements for submission.
- natejenkins 14y ago
  Hi, Authorea co-founder here. A bit surprised to see us on the front page. 1. Full access to the git repository will be added soon. It wasn't our main concern initially as we wanted it to be easy to work on articles for an academic researcher who wasn't familiar with git. 2. This currently requires some post-authorea cleanup. We are also working on making this much easier. The main pain point that we are trying to solve currently is making collaboration on articles easy.
  - synparb 14y ago
    Great to hear that these things are planned. I think #2 is really quite important, because if there isn't a simple path to preparing a submission-ready document, then there is still a major point of friction in the process.
    - matteocantiello 14y ago
      Hi, Authorea consultant here. I completely agree. It's important to provide a seamless way to export Authorea articles to submission-ready format, for example by including the relevant Journal style file (or even giving users the option to chose from a list). Work in progress.
rdw 14y ago
The LaTeX support seems very nice. Nice job! The concept of a paper as a DVCS repository is a very natural one, and it's exactly how I would write my papers back in the day. I'm curious how the "host the data and the code" comes in. Perhaps you're supposed to clone the backing git repository and add the code to that, but I don't see how to do that yet. Early days.
- natejenkins 14y ago
  Hey, thanks for the compliment! Much appreciated. If you look at a figure in an article, for example https://www.authorea.com/483 https://www.authorea.com/483, you'll notice that the figure reference has been pulled out of the latex source. We did that so that in the online version of an article we can make figures cooler, like attaching data to them. Figures exist in their own folders, and we have big plans for those folders.
xaa 14y ago
Something like this is sorely needed. Google Docs is the best compromise between simplicity and collaboration that my group has come up with, but of course it doesn't have reference support. It is very visually appealing and has good features. However, for me, it seems very sluggish and unresponsive.
- natejenkins 14y ago
  The speed definitely needs to be worked on. We were planning on a "Show HN" post once we had modified the architecture a bit. It's all on a single server right now. Sorry about the sluggishness.
  - synparb 14y ago
    Sorry if I exposed you guys prematurely. I stumbled upon it and thought it was a fantastic idea that solves a lot of fundamental issues with collaborating on papers. I've been using Mercurial and bitbucket for this purpose for a while, but it's definitely an issue trying to get collaborators to work this way (if I can even get some of them to clear the LaTex hurdle first). I really hope this becomes a viable option soon.
    - apepe 14y ago
      hey- Alberto here (Authorea co-founder). Glad to see us on the frontpage of HN, but as Nate said, we weren't really ready for it. I was cooking dinner! Sorry if we're still a bit sluggish.
    - natejenkins 14y ago
      No apologies needed. The timing is pretty good, we were going to do it in two weeks or so. We've been working on this for about a year now and for the first 8 or 9 months I was telling people that it was usable but not useful. I think it crossed the barrier into useful a few months ago. I don't know if you've noticed, but we also give the option to write in Markdown. Citations work too, as long as you put them in Latex style, ie \cite{synparb}. Markdown is nearly powerful enough to write a full-featured article, and Latex is clearly overpowered. I like the idea of extending Markdown to give it everything one would need to write an article, without all of the excess. I hope you try this out on your collaborators.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
interconnector 14y ago
ShareLaTeX is also worth checking out: https://www.sharelatex.com/ https://www.sharelatex.com/
- matteocantiello 14y ago
  Notice though the big conceptual difference between any online (collaborative) LaTeX editor and Authorea. In Authorea articles are written in a browser and live in the browser (as HTML5 pages). There is a huge potential to be exploited by such a paradigm shift.
  - sciurus 14y ago
    If I'm writing a paper, it's great for collaboration if it can be written in the browser. Being able to preview my paper in the browser sounds nice too, but to publish it I need to be able to compile it into a PDF.
    - apepe 14y ago
      yes, we (scientists and scholars) still rely on the exchange of PDFs to communicate research. This is a pity. The problem is that a scholarly paper in PDF, even when it is on the web, it is essentially a photograph of a (physical, analog) paper. As such, a PDF fails to expose the living, dynamic, interactive nature of research. The baseline motivation for Authorea is to expose such nature: to expose the data underlying plots and images, to allow articles to be forked and cloned, to enable web-native data visualizations, to get version control right, and so on. We are trying to move in this direction!
      - neumann 14y ago
        I hear what you are yearning for - I remember trying to convince my supervisor that researchers need to look towards github for progress. His response stuck with me: While scientific research is continuous and never complete, the whole point of publication is that it is a record in a fixed point in time. The results and discussion cannot be altered, or reused: it is a milestone, a historical record of a novel contribution to knowledge. Sure, you might reanalyse your data, rework an image with new parameters what have you, but the nature of sharing your work with your scientific community requires it to be static.
natejenkins 14y ago
Our goal is to reinvent the article online. One thing that really needs to change is that figures need to come to life. While there are a few ways too accomplish this, one is by using javascript libraries such as d3.js to render dynamic images. As an example of things to come, have a look at: https://www.authorea.com/522 https://www.authorea.com/522 Does not work in Firefox at the moment.
- jimmaswell 14y ago
  If it doesn't work in Firefox you're probably not following standards. Why?
  - natejenkins 14y ago
    It uses the sandbox feature for an iframe in html5. It doesn't seem to be supported yet in Firefox. Although if it is I'm sure someone will correct me.
    - numair 14y ago
      http://caniuse.com/iframe-sandbox http://caniuse.com/iframe-sandbox Might want to update your browser detection script.
- astrobiased 14y ago
  [Authorea consultant here] This feature is quite exciting. Using JS based plotting capabilities like D3.js will allow users to do two things at once. (1) Provide dynamic figures to represent data that is normally ineffective in static form and (2) provide the code and data that was used to create it. This helps others reproduce the results from the data to figure form, which is a feature that is definitely missing in PDF publications.
xur17 14y ago
Looks great! One quick comment - the links on the left hand side of an article should only take up enough space to fit the text for the links, so more space can be dedicated to the article. Ex: https://www.authorea.com/users/1/articles/483/_show_article https://www.authorea.com/users/1/articles/483/_show_article Otherwise, it looks great - I'm going to be starting to write my thesis soon, and I plan to try this out.
- apepe 14y ago
  thanks for the tip! You are right indeed. Not the best use of whitespace there. We are still polishing up the front end a bit. It would be wonderful if you gave Authorea a try for your thesis. Feel free to get in touch for support as rendering a very long document in the browser may be more cumbersome than regular academic papers.
  - xur17 14y ago
    Will do! I think some other people mentioned this too, but I'd love the ability to connect this to my own git repository so I can store / have access to all of my changes.
    - apepe 14y ago
      yep, git access and offline mode are two features that are coming real soon. thanks again!
  - raphman 14y ago
    Small typo: "insitutional" [1] [1] https://www.authorea.com/user_plans https://www.authorea.com/user_plans
    - natejenkins 14y ago
      good eye, thanks!
ank286 14y ago
Landing page comment: "Write research papers, right inside your browser" As a researcher, I immediately ask "Why?" What is wrong with my Latek utils and fabulous MS Word that my research lab gave me for free. Then, where are some templates for the journals/conferences I could possible use with Authorea. You can reach far more people if you included templates from most journals/conferences. Then I can see this taking off.. Otherwise it is nothing but a fancy text-editor to me with Latek support and is trying to be like arXiv. As it is, arXiv has a lot of noisy publications.
- matteocantiello 14y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. This is still work in progress, and we are planning to improve the export function to publication-ready format (as you suggest). This said, we want to bring the authoring process to the web principally for 2 reasons: 1) It makes collaboration easier 2) It expands dramatically the possibilities of sharing scientific content respect to a 'static' PDF format, ultimately impacting transparency and reproducibility of scientific results.
  - ank286 14y ago
    I just want templates for different journals/conferences for the same topic. All their formats are annoying, but at the end of the day, every PI/researchers wants to publish in something that is peer-reviewed. In a university setting, paying to read/download a publication is an after-thought. The entire transparency/reproducibility of scientific results is a good goal but is very long-term goal. Some entities like ScholarOne/Cambridge Journals wants you to individually upload your images and your text separately. Since a user is just writing their paper on Authorea, maybe, you can keep track of what journals they are aiming for and reformat the publication for multiple journals in ONE SHOT. That'd be the biggest time saver ever. At the end, doing research is fun but publishing is a painful process, and you are judged based on publications. Reduce the pain.
    - matteocantiello 14y ago
      I totally hear you. And this is part of what we want to accomplish. As for the transparency/reproducibility I do not think this is too much long-term: already now if you prepare a paper on Authorea and publish it on a refereed journal, you can include a link to the Authorea repository. Which means even if the Journal version is static, it links to a 'dynamic' repository which contains the sources of your scientific work. So I believe Authorea is already pretty close to achieving that goal.
toomim 14y ago
FUCK YHEAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! I'M GOING TO USE THIS RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just like, update to the internet, man. I want my articles to look beautiful on the web, not just in antiquated print journals!!!!! Why, in 2013 do references need to look like this (Johnson-Kines et al., 1533) when we have HYPERLINKS on the web??? And you can show a little snippet in a tooltip--or the actual quote or line of the document that you're referencing? Where are my embedded videos?
- toomim 14y ago
  ACK. I tried using it. Too many bugs! UI needs polish. When you fix this, please announce it to me. I want to use a version that works!
  - apepe 14y ago
    hi toomim, yes we are still a bit rough around the edges. We are only a few months old. If you can let us know what bugs you found, it'd be great. And we will definitely announce it again as soon as we are ready for a more official launch. Thanks for checking us out
RichardPrice 14y ago
Authorea is a great project. I love the idea of helping academics write their papers natively for the web. Good luck Nate and Alberto!
- apepe 14y ago
  Thanks Richard! I am so glad you like Authorea. It was great chatting about Academia.edu last month at the Berkman. I look forward to meeting up soon. --Alberto
lsiebert 14y ago
I'm on mobile, but does this have zotero integration?
- natejenkins 14y ago
  not yet (sorry), but it's on the list.
  - lsiebert 14y ago
    Awesome. Thank you for making something cool.
icelancer 14y ago
Thank god. I have been planning on writing a bunch of papers to publish on my website and all of the options have been awful. So far, it looks great. Thanks for the service. Can't wait to try it out.
- matteocantiello 14y ago
  Thanks. Please try and give us feedback. We are very happy to hear from users!
goldfeld 14y ago
This is a great answer to all this "open up the papers" movement, and going forward a much better solution than those apps that cropped up for asking for a given research paper. If things remain open, that is. A github for papers sounds great, and an actual natural extension of the idea of github. Whereas github is pragmatic projects, authorea is the step before that.
- matteocantiello 14y ago
  Exactly! And at the same time we can exploit the power of the web, which unfolds into an easier approach to collaboration and a wider range of possibilities in terms of ways to show / plot / share the data and any other products of the scientific research. "Papers" haven't changed at all in the last few hundred years, but research and technology has dramatically. It's time to keep up.
skyahead 14y ago
Latex is free! Authorea is NOT. This is the main problem I see. And the second problem, who will write papers in public before publication?
- jclos 14y ago
  These two problems are related - I don't mind having the final product in public (it's bound to get there eventually) and thus not having to pay too much (or even use the free tier), but putting everything in public before publication is insane and I doubt it will be used for anything but blog posts for that reason.
  - apepe 14y ago
    hi jclos, I don't think that putting out research content out in the open is insane, as you say. While privacy is indeed a good and a safe idea in a number of contexts, for most research projects, sharing the full sources from the very beginning is only advantageous. For example, less secrecy encourages collaboration, rather than competition. Also, it is a way for authors to claim their ideas and work as soon as they have it. Why wait months before getting something published when we have a fast modern content publication system right in front of our eyes? I have a vision, and I may be wrong. But my vision is to use the web to publish and disseminate scientific content: science you can fork, clone, reproduce, and interact with, from the very first word you jot down in a paper, up to the last equation. My hope is that Authorea is a step in the right direction.
    - jclos 14y ago
      I understand, and I agree to some extent, but the truth is that it is too risky. In my country at least, but I'm sure it is the same for most, researchers survive by putting their quota (fixed by the ministry of research) of publications in well renowned journals. The risk of having someone "steal" your idea (in the very loose definition) and beat you to the publication, for instance by having a bigger research team, thus putting you out of a job, is a real one. In an ideal world your system would be perfect, putting the advancement of knowledge before everything else (as open source does with software), but researchers have to look out for themselves before all, considering how their performance is evaluated and how that affects their livelihood. Unlike open source software, there aren't a lot of ways to monetize scientific publications. I would enjoy seeing things change, but change is slow to come. Especially in an area as pachydermic and anchored in traditions as academia. I really like Authorea and I will use it for non-published work, but I feel that limiting private publications so much is going to limit adoption. But then again what do I know, I guess we will see how it goes.
krcz 14y ago
That's a great idea and really good implementation. The only thing I'd miss from Google Docs are comments that are not part of a text (in Docs these are rendered on right side of document). You could implement it by come special syntax for comments, which wouldn't render when exported and on site, and in edit mode, it would show just a little icon. GUI option to click somewhere to add comment in this place would make it even easier. It allows further capabilities, like easy inline peer review.
yannis 14y ago
Strange enough I had a very similar idea see http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/83588/latex-mark-up-as-a-generic-mark-up-language http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/83588/latex-mark-up-a... and made a prototype. Would be glad to share ideas if you want. Please contact via tex.sx chat.

85 points by synparb 14y ago

I'm curious how easy it's going to be to (1) download the git repo from the backend, and (2) format the articles to meet specific journal requirements for submission.

natejenkins 14y ago
Hi, Authorea co-founder here. A bit surprised to see us on the front page. 1. Full access to the git repository will be added soon. It wasn't our main concern initially as we wanted it to be easy to work on articles for an academic researcher who wasn't familiar with git. 2. This currently requires some post-authorea cleanup. We are also working on making this much easier. The main pain point that we are trying to solve currently is making collaboration on articles easy.
- synparb 14y ago
  Great to hear that these things are planned. I think #2 is really quite important, because if there isn't a simple path to preparing a submission-ready document, then there is still a major point of friction in the process.
  - matteocantiello 14y ago
    Hi, Authorea consultant here. I completely agree. It's important to provide a seamless way to export Authorea articles to submission-ready format, for example by including the relevant Journal style file (or even giving users the option to chose from a list). Work in progress.

rdw 14y ago

The LaTeX support seems very nice. Nice job! The concept of a paper as a DVCS repository is a very natural one, and it's exactly how I would write my papers back in the day. I'm curious how the "host the data and the code" comes in. Perhaps you're supposed to clone the backing git repository and add the code to that, but I don't see how to do that yet. Early days.

natejenkins 14y ago
Hey, thanks for the compliment! Much appreciated. If you look at a figure in an article, for example https://www.authorea.com/483 https://www.authorea.com/483, you'll notice that the figure reference has been pulled out of the latex source. We did that so that in the online version of an article we can make figures cooler, like attaching data to them. Figures exist in their own folders, and we have big plans for those folders.

xaa 14y ago

Something like this is sorely needed. Google Docs is the best compromise between simplicity and collaboration that my group has come up with, but of course it doesn't have reference support. It is very visually appealing and has good features. However, for me, it seems very sluggish and unresponsive.

natejenkins 14y ago
The speed definitely needs to be worked on. We were planning on a "Show HN" post once we had modified the architecture a bit. It's all on a single server right now. Sorry about the sluggishness.
- synparb 14y ago
  Sorry if I exposed you guys prematurely. I stumbled upon it and thought it was a fantastic idea that solves a lot of fundamental issues with collaborating on papers. I've been using Mercurial and bitbucket for this purpose for a while, but it's definitely an issue trying to get collaborators to work this way (if I can even get some of them to clear the LaTex hurdle first). I really hope this becomes a viable option soon.
  - apepe 14y ago
    hey- Alberto here (Authorea co-founder). Glad to see us on the frontpage of HN, but as Nate said, we weren't really ready for it. I was cooking dinner! Sorry if we're still a bit sluggish.
  - natejenkins 14y ago
    No apologies needed. The timing is pretty good, we were going to do it in two weeks or so. We've been working on this for about a year now and for the first 8 or 9 months I was telling people that it was usable but not useful. I think it crossed the barrier into useful a few months ago. I don't know if you've noticed, but we also give the option to write in Markdown. Citations work too, as long as you put them in Latex style, ie \cite{synparb}. Markdown is nearly powerful enough to write a full-featured article, and Latex is clearly overpowered. I like the idea of extending Markdown to give it everything one would need to write an article, without all of the excess. I hope you try this out on your collaborators.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

interconnector 14y ago

ShareLaTeX is also worth checking out: https://www.sharelatex.com/ https://www.sharelatex.com/

matteocantiello 14y ago
Notice though the big conceptual difference between any online (collaborative) LaTeX editor and Authorea. In Authorea articles are written in a browser and live in the browser (as HTML5 pages). There is a huge potential to be exploited by such a paradigm shift.
- sciurus 14y ago
  If I'm writing a paper, it's great for collaboration if it can be written in the browser. Being able to preview my paper in the browser sounds nice too, but to publish it I need to be able to compile it into a PDF.
  - apepe 14y ago
    yes, we (scientists and scholars) still rely on the exchange of PDFs to communicate research. This is a pity. The problem is that a scholarly paper in PDF, even when it is on the web, it is essentially a photograph of a (physical, analog) paper. As such, a PDF fails to expose the living, dynamic, interactive nature of research. The baseline motivation for Authorea is to expose such nature: to expose the data underlying plots and images, to allow articles to be forked and cloned, to enable web-native data visualizations, to get version control right, and so on. We are trying to move in this direction!
    - neumann 14y ago
      I hear what you are yearning for - I remember trying to convince my supervisor that researchers need to look towards github for progress. His response stuck with me: While scientific research is continuous and never complete, the whole point of publication is that it is a record in a fixed point in time. The results and discussion cannot be altered, or reused: it is a milestone, a historical record of a novel contribution to knowledge. Sure, you might reanalyse your data, rework an image with new parameters what have you, but the nature of sharing your work with your scientific community requires it to be static.

natejenkins 14y ago

Our goal is to reinvent the article online. One thing that really needs to change is that figures need to come to life. While there are a few ways too accomplish this, one is by using javascript libraries such as d3.js to render dynamic images. As an example of things to come, have a look at: https://www.authorea.com/522 https://www.authorea.com/522 Does not work in Firefox at the moment.

jimmaswell 14y ago
If it doesn't work in Firefox you're probably not following standards. Why?
- natejenkins 14y ago
  It uses the sandbox feature for an iframe in html5. It doesn't seem to be supported yet in Firefox. Although if it is I'm sure someone will correct me.
  - numair 14y ago
    http://caniuse.com/iframe-sandbox http://caniuse.com/iframe-sandbox Might want to update your browser detection script.
astrobiased 14y ago
[Authorea consultant here] This feature is quite exciting. Using JS based plotting capabilities like D3.js will allow users to do two things at once. (1) Provide dynamic figures to represent data that is normally ineffective in static form and (2) provide the code and data that was used to create it. This helps others reproduce the results from the data to figure form, which is a feature that is definitely missing in PDF publications.

xur17 14y ago

Looks great! One quick comment - the links on the left hand side of an article should only take up enough space to fit the text for the links, so more space can be dedicated to the article. Ex: https://www.authorea.com/users/1/articles/483/_show_article https://www.authorea.com/users/1/articles/483/_show_article Otherwise, it looks great - I'm going to be starting to write my thesis soon, and I plan to try this out.

apepe 14y ago
thanks for the tip! You are right indeed. Not the best use of whitespace there. We are still polishing up the front end a bit. It would be wonderful if you gave Authorea a try for your thesis. Feel free to get in touch for support as rendering a very long document in the browser may be more cumbersome than regular academic papers.
- xur17 14y ago
  Will do! I think some other people mentioned this too, but I'd love the ability to connect this to my own git repository so I can store / have access to all of my changes.
  - apepe 14y ago
    yep, git access and offline mode are two features that are coming real soon. thanks again!
- raphman 14y ago
  Small typo: "insitutional" [1] [1] https://www.authorea.com/user_plans https://www.authorea.com/user_plans
  - natejenkins 14y ago
    good eye, thanks!

ank286 14y ago

Landing page comment: "Write research papers, right inside your browser" As a researcher, I immediately ask "Why?" What is wrong with my Latek utils and fabulous MS Word that my research lab gave me for free. Then, where are some templates for the journals/conferences I could possible use with Authorea. You can reach far more people if you included templates from most journals/conferences. Then I can see this taking off.. Otherwise it is nothing but a fancy text-editor to me with Latek support and is trying to be like arXiv. As it is, arXiv has a lot of noisy publications.

matteocantiello 14y ago
Thanks for the feedback. This is still work in progress, and we are planning to improve the export function to publication-ready format (as you suggest). This said, we want to bring the authoring process to the web principally for 2 reasons: 1) It makes collaboration easier 2) It expands dramatically the possibilities of sharing scientific content respect to a 'static' PDF format, ultimately impacting transparency and reproducibility of scientific results.
- ank286 14y ago
  I just want templates for different journals/conferences for the same topic. All their formats are annoying, but at the end of the day, every PI/researchers wants to publish in something that is peer-reviewed. In a university setting, paying to read/download a publication is an after-thought. The entire transparency/reproducibility of scientific results is a good goal but is very long-term goal. Some entities like ScholarOne/Cambridge Journals wants you to individually upload your images and your text separately. Since a user is just writing their paper on Authorea, maybe, you can keep track of what journals they are aiming for and reformat the publication for multiple journals in ONE SHOT. That'd be the biggest time saver ever. At the end, doing research is fun but publishing is a painful process, and you are judged based on publications. Reduce the pain.
  - matteocantiello 14y ago
    I totally hear you. And this is part of what we want to accomplish. As for the transparency/reproducibility I do not think this is too much long-term: already now if you prepare a paper on Authorea and publish it on a refereed journal, you can include a link to the Authorea repository. Which means even if the Journal version is static, it links to a 'dynamic' repository which contains the sources of your scientific work. So I believe Authorea is already pretty close to achieving that goal.

toomim 14y ago

FUCK YHEAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! I'M GOING TO USE THIS RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just like, update to the internet, man. I want my articles to look beautiful on the web, not just in antiquated print journals!!!!! Why, in 2013 do references need to look like this (Johnson-Kines et al., 1533) when we have HYPERLINKS on the web??? And you can show a little snippet in a tooltip--or the actual quote or line of the document that you're referencing? Where are my embedded videos?

toomim 14y ago
ACK. I tried using it. Too many bugs! UI needs polish. When you fix this, please announce it to me. I want to use a version that works!
- apepe 14y ago
  hi toomim, yes we are still a bit rough around the edges. We are only a few months old. If you can let us know what bugs you found, it'd be great. And we will definitely announce it again as soon as we are ready for a more official launch. Thanks for checking us out

RichardPrice 14y ago

Authorea is a great project. I love the idea of helping academics write their papers natively for the web. Good luck Nate and Alberto!

apepe 14y ago
Thanks Richard! I am so glad you like Authorea. It was great chatting about Academia.edu last month at the Berkman. I look forward to meeting up soon. --Alberto

lsiebert 14y ago

I'm on mobile, but does this have zotero integration?

natejenkins 14y ago
not yet (sorry), but it's on the list.
- lsiebert 14y ago
  Awesome. Thank you for making something cool.

icelancer 14y ago

Thank god. I have been planning on writing a bunch of papers to publish on my website and all of the options have been awful. So far, it looks great. Thanks for the service. Can't wait to try it out.

matteocantiello 14y ago
Thanks. Please try and give us feedback. We are very happy to hear from users!

goldfeld 14y ago

This is a great answer to all this "open up the papers" movement, and going forward a much better solution than those apps that cropped up for asking for a given research paper. If things remain open, that is. A github for papers sounds great, and an actual natural extension of the idea of github. Whereas github is pragmatic projects, authorea is the step before that.

matteocantiello 14y ago
Exactly! And at the same time we can exploit the power of the web, which unfolds into an easier approach to collaboration and a wider range of possibilities in terms of ways to show / plot / share the data and any other products of the scientific research. "Papers" haven't changed at all in the last few hundred years, but research and technology has dramatically. It's time to keep up.

skyahead 14y ago

Latex is free! Authorea is NOT. This is the main problem I see. And the second problem, who will write papers in public before publication?

jclos 14y ago
These two problems are related - I don't mind having the final product in public (it's bound to get there eventually) and thus not having to pay too much (or even use the free tier), but putting everything in public before publication is insane and I doubt it will be used for anything but blog posts for that reason.
- apepe 14y ago
  hi jclos, I don't think that putting out research content out in the open is insane, as you say. While privacy is indeed a good and a safe idea in a number of contexts, for most research projects, sharing the full sources from the very beginning is only advantageous. For example, less secrecy encourages collaboration, rather than competition. Also, it is a way for authors to claim their ideas and work as soon as they have it. Why wait months before getting something published when we have a fast modern content publication system right in front of our eyes? I have a vision, and I may be wrong. But my vision is to use the web to publish and disseminate scientific content: science you can fork, clone, reproduce, and interact with, from the very first word you jot down in a paper, up to the last equation. My hope is that Authorea is a step in the right direction.
  - jclos 14y ago
    I understand, and I agree to some extent, but the truth is that it is too risky. In my country at least, but I'm sure it is the same for most, researchers survive by putting their quota (fixed by the ministry of research) of publications in well renowned journals. The risk of having someone "steal" your idea (in the very loose definition) and beat you to the publication, for instance by having a bigger research team, thus putting you out of a job, is a real one. In an ideal world your system would be perfect, putting the advancement of knowledge before everything else (as open source does with software), but researchers have to look out for themselves before all, considering how their performance is evaluated and how that affects their livelihood. Unlike open source software, there aren't a lot of ways to monetize scientific publications. I would enjoy seeing things change, but change is slow to come. Especially in an area as pachydermic and anchored in traditions as academia. I really like Authorea and I will use it for non-published work, but I feel that limiting private publications so much is going to limit adoption. But then again what do I know, I guess we will see how it goes.

krcz 14y ago

That's a great idea and really good implementation. The only thing I'd miss from Google Docs are comments that are not part of a text (in Docs these are rendered on right side of document). You could implement it by come special syntax for comments, which wouldn't render when exported and on site, and in edit mode, it would show just a little icon. GUI option to click somewhere to add comment in this place would make it even easier. It allows further capabilities, like easy inline peer review.

yannis 14y ago

Strange enough I had a very similar idea see http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/83588/latex-mark-up-as-a-generic-mark-up-language http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/83588/latex-mark-up-a... and made a prototype. Would be glad to share ideas if you want. Please contact via tex.sx chat.