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Comment by ank286 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Hey, thanks for the comments. It is true that your research lab gave you MS Word for free, but that doesn't mean someone didn't have to pay for it in order to give it to you. I personally don't like the experience of writing articles in Word, but I can totally see how many people would be fine with it, especially if their work is not equation-heavy.

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.

I second the suggestion to add support for templates for most well-known publishers. For example, in CS even having Springer and IEEE 2-column templates supported would have been enough for me when I was involved in writing papers. I think that when you have publisher template support for the few major publishers in a field, there is much less of a barrier for the researchers in the field to start using authorea. This would IMO not be in conflict with the long term vision of moving papers to web but rather a first step in getting enough users for the publishers to listen.

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.

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.

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.

What if the Journal asks for a transfer of copyright? Does that violate some kind of law/thing for all the previous (including the final) version of the manuscript stored on Authorea? Would the author have to take down their final-manuscript from Authorea so they can transfer the copyright to the publisher/Journal.

hi there- by and large, authors are allowed to publish the pre-print and post-print versions of their published manuscripts (pre-print being the version right before editor proof-reading, and post-print any version following publication). Authorea articles are essentially "enriched" pre-prints so they do not interfere with the passing of the copyright to publishers.

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