Overleaf: collaborative LaTeX-based writing and publishing
overleaf.com
overleaf.com
The new addition of conference/journal templates and integrated spell check is really opening it up to a broader audiences than just CS-centric users.
My friend (with very little coding experience) saw my resume and asked for help to craft his own. I sent him overleaf.com and a template and he was able to get started with LaTeX in their side-by-side environment and was able to add his own content very easily. I know without this service it would have been a headache setting up LaTeX for him locally and walking him through it, so props to the overleaf team for abstracting the tech this way.
People who advance science as we know it, and those who target big journals (Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine, etc.) are unlikely to want to store their manuscript on a third party website like this.
But it is true that the former group is significantly larger.
I never put a paper up on github until after it has been published, and I've seen considerable push-back from fellow scientists at the suggestion we consider it.
Despite the pervasive influence of github, it is quite easy to spawn local git/svn/hg repos.
- Rich text mode on Overleaf makes it a lot easier to collaborate with colleagues who would otherwise be put off by a wall of LaTeX code.
- Automatic compiling on Overleaf - you don't need to manually hit compile, we do it automatically. This makes it easier for authors new to LaTeX as errors can't build up
- Unlimited collaborators - share the project with as many people as you like.
- Direct links to publishers to help streamline the submission process for academic papers.
Feedback always very welcome! Lots of different ways to approach this, and we're continuing to build and improve on the service.
I believe a more practical feature is adding roles! I mean Editor,Co-Editor, Publisher, Copywriter, Professor, Examiner, Teacher etc. all of these have different jobs, although very similar they do different things. If you give these poor guys a UI or Workflow, that'd be great I think.
Well, if you need a killer argument to sell your product, you'd have to be able to say:
"You write alone or together, we proofread, suggest media, translate, publish, print or schedule submissions for just n$/mo."
Ok, you'd have to integrate external API from ie. commercial online newspapers, qualitative semantically fitting graphics, smart autocompletions with professional "sentence snippets" and so on. Most important thing is to sell it to universities though imho.