How is Authorea different from Google Docs? | Hacker News Reader

How is Authorea different from Google Docs?

authorea.com

45 pointsapepe27 comments

I think your competition isn't Google Docs so much as writelatex and sharelatex:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=Authorea,+wr...

I've used sharelatex before for academic publications and it was convenient. The reason is the academic publication I was submitting to had this latex template that I had to work within and sharelatex imported that without issue.

For academic publications almost no one uses Microsoft Word except for a small minority. I think that in the online world then it is still going to be latex that dominants for academic purposes.

Having live data drive the documents is a great idea though, and your UI looks polished, but its content should be primarily latex with some wysiwyg interfaces on top of it in my opinion if your market is academics.

> For academic publications almost no one uses Microsoft Word except for a small minority.

Sure, we're all biased by our own experiences, but I've found this to be blatantly false in the biological sciences. Microsoft Word dominates, if only for its comment and change tracking and ease-of-use.

I'd love to use latex, but very few of my collaborators even know the syntax. I think latex predominantly rules in physics, math, and perhaps some engineering fields (but certainly not BME). Definitely not all of academia.

(As an aside, I have a hard time not pronouncing the name as Authorrhea).

great point about MS Word use.. see my other comment. And yeah our name is prone to explosive jokes... :)

I can also attest to the biological sciences reliance on Word and Track Changes. It's maddening at times but then again my 80 year old PI (whose in the lab everyday doing wet work still!) can use it and every computer on our campus (some 1000 or so) can be used to edit our drafts .

I and some of my other colleagues would much rather move into something like Google Docs and we've done so to a limited extent. I wish someone had told me about Authorea a month ago before I started another manuscript in Word. I'm happy to take the hour and my PI is happy to spend the hour for me to show him how to use other editing and collaboration tools. I just need to know about them!

This is also true in management science. Some top journals require Word submissions (to my dismay). Word works okay with limited authors & citations, but our research lab ran into a ton of problems when we had 10+ collaborators working on a single document with hundreds of citations. It would have been no problem with source control and Latex.

hi, great point. It is true that at the moment our userbase is mostly physicists/astrophysicists and computer scientists who heavily use LaTeX. But we are not super committed to LaTeX. (In fact, I am annoyed by LaTeX as much as the next guy.) We already fully support Markdown and soon AsciiDoc and MediaWiki. An HTML5 wysiwyg is coming soon as well.

You are wrong, however, when you say that for academic publications almost no one uses MS Word. In fact, only 5% of academic submissions (in all academic journals) are received in LaTeX. 95% is Word.

Wrt LaTeX - I converted a few people (including one assistant professor in psychology) from Word to LaTeX. And a lot more use tools like LyX to have LaTeX where it shines (formulas, bibliography, typesetting of output) but without the typical overhead.

And I am a firm believer that with so many plug-and-play LaTeX (Authorea, WriteLaTeX, ShareLaTeX and a few others) much more people will use LaTeX (or at least - its good parts), as the entry barrier went practically down to zero.

(As a side note - from user's perspective, $\formula$ and $$\formula$$ are much easier to see than $\formula$ and \[\formula\]. I know that in the second case, the later is more correct, but Markdown _is_ about clarity, not purity of syntax.)

I agree. Google Docs/Drive can do all these things and more. If they compare themselves to Google Docs they will lose. Makes more sense to compare itself to other Latex editors.

# Writing Scientific Content

Docs is perfectly capable of doing that. I did the same formula easily in 2 minutes.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r6gmCkQrWLU7W9lt2AsSuqeJ...

# Export options

I think this is the only one I would agree with. I'm not specially familiar with academic paper formats. I suppose Authorea does Latex exports which is nice.

# Version Control

Google Docs have that as well. Not as Git repositories, but with a proper interface that is more user friendly. Maybe you could argue that they are more developer friendly but I wonder if that will resonate with their target audience.

# Collaboration

I don't see how locking a paragraph is a good thing. Anything here I think it's a point to Google.

# Data-driven articles

Google Docs is part of Drive and integrate Spreadsheets. They both can be scripted using Apps Script. Plus you can use other applications to handle any kind of data you through at it.

These guys are still vulnerable to heartbleed. I witnessed my username and password in plain text from the server's memory when I signed up with a test account.

Entirely my fault, very sorry about that. Should be fixed now.

As a side note, when it comes to various solutions and ideas wrt using LaTeX + Markdown, there is a discussion: https://hackpad.com/New-scientific-markup-language-utAjFcYuv...

Thank you. I will join the discussion. And wow, hackpad looks so good.

Great product. You should have friendly URL's for users, like Github has https://github.com/username. Also, it would be nice to make it easy to incorporate secondary information. A lot of scientific publications involve code and raw experimental data, which is usually not included in the final paper, but is nonetheless of potential interest to others. Providing hosting for this seems like an additional revenue opportunity.

You can add any additional files to the repo. In the browser upload the file size is limited to 10MB.

So say an academic lab wanted to move all their projects in Authorea and they're already using git for versioning. Can we import and maintain our versioning?

Although this is not really possible entirely from the user-side I'd be happy to help getting your projects setup on Authorea. Generally speaking, importing an existing project creates a new git repo on Authorea which can then be mirrored to Github. However, I can setup your articles from the admin side using existing repos as the starting points.

Gotcha, that's pretty nice. I'll talk with my PI about it.

Social logins would be great

And they have been on the todo list for a shamefully long time.

Where were you the last 5 years?!

Interesting, but not ethical. This wants to be the scientific version Google Docs? Well, have a good fight with http://substance.io/ which is 1) opensource 2) very well implemented 3) has a broader vision 4) 5 years ahead of it.

Get the science back to the people, please.

https://stackedit.io/ is Markdown + LaTeX, but uses Google Docs to sync.

hey yuchi- I talked to the Substance guys just a few days ago. Great guys. We hope to collaborate with them soon. I am not sure why Authorea is not "ethical" though. Ciao!

I have to clarify that I should have said ‘enough’ :) And ‘ethical’ could be not the most accurate term for this but here’s my take on this. In the scientific world there’s so much closed software, so much closeness. A real revolution (and I’m sure you’re pushing it too as much as Substance) should be in the open world, as a whole. I do understand that monetization must happen somewhere, but I’m scared to see such a revolution happen on a closed platform.

Disclaimer #1: I had the chance to work with the Substance guys but I’m not affiliated with them anymore.

Disclaimer #2: Diamine, non avevo notato che fossi italiano. Damn, I didn’t notice that you are italian. Such a pleasure.

piacere mio!

not ethical

Can you elaborate, please? I honestly cannot make a connection between the original post and any question of dubious ethics. While I am unlikely to use Authorea any time soon (not in the target market) it seems like a very cool idea. Where do the ethical concerns arise?

I answered on @apepe. Mostly it’s about the openness of the product. The formats are open, but how you interact with them is not.

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