Authorea: Write research papers inside your browser
authorea.com
authorea.com
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.
I prefer writing in Latex more than Word, but it still isn't a happy experience for me. The errors are nearly useless, I'm constantly compiling and waiting for pdf output, and then I have a static pdf as output, which isn't so exciting.
That's why we decided to try and build something different. I want to look at rendered text most of the time during my workflow, but I don't want to use Word. I'd prefer a markup language with a nice-looking, easy to remember, syntax, which is why we offer Markdown. Collaboration should be easy, which is why it's online. I want things to be dynamic, which is why we're working on that. I want to share my data with my figures and my analysis with my data. Again, we're working on that.
It is true that in 2013 what is important is publishing in respected peer-reviewed journals. But we're really trying to think about what an article is going to look like in 2023. I highly doubt it is going to be a static pdf (or static html version of said pdf) available only to paying users of a respected journal, or users whose institutions are nice enough to pay for them.
I'll be the first to admit that we have a long way to go, but we gotta start somewhere.
It is very visually appealing and has good features. However, for me, it seems very sluggish and unresponsive.
Sorry about the sluggishness.
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.
Markdown is a real pleasure to use. One of my favorite features is that it is easy on the eyes. I was never in love with the Latex syntax.
Out of curiosity, can I ask what field you are in?
For my last paper though, I was able to do it all with Google Docs, except the citations. I ended up just embedding citations like {author, 2013} and using either Papers or endnote to do the insertion.
However, I still had to submit the article in word format, so I really didn't gain anything and had to effectively reformat it 3 times. I think this has as much to do with Word/Endnote's de facto monopoly as anything. Since the journals require it, we work with it.
All of that said - I'd love to see something like this take off, but there would have to be some buy-in from the publishers.
As one of the founders of https://www.writelatex.com, one of the interesting differences is the fact you're editing the "output" file rather than the source - takes a bit of getting used to! Looking forward to seeing it develop :-)
Yes, we (and most scholars in general) are very used to editing a source (Latex mostly) and compiling it to something else (a PDF output, or similar). We are trying to streamline that process using the web as the canvas, and render directly to HTML5. In a way you are right, it feels like you are editing directly the HTML output. Which is fine! Our hope is that researchers, especially the ones who already work and write on the web will quickly get used to such a workflow.
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
Does not work in Firefox at the moment.
Might want to update your browser detection script.
(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.
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.
Ex: 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.
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.
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.
If you look at a figure in an article, for example 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.
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.
We are a long way from that now, but it is appealing.
And the second problem, who will write papers in public before publication?
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.
To complete the analogy, if I have a github repository cloned locally, I have no need of github to have full access to the source code and history on my machine. Will I be able to have a local copy of my Authorea paper and all the local tools to construct and view it? Github leverages the distributed nature of git beautifully, and adds value with collaborative features. Will Authorea as well?
So far, it looks great. Thanks for the service. Can't wait to try it out.
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?
When you fix this, please announce it to me. I want to use a version that works!