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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.

hi there- well, you could also say that Git is free, while GitHub is not. But that would be a far-fetched statement because GitHub is currently a free service for (hundreds of?) thousands of users who publish source code in the open (Open Source). In a similar vein, Authorea will be ALWAYS free to author and access public, Open Science articles. At Authorea, we like open, transparent, reproducible research and we are trying to encourage people to publish in the open (Open Science). We hope to set up institutional licenses with universities, so that subscriptions will not be a burden on readers or scientists. This is the best model we can think to benefit science and the public, while keeping us alive. Any comments appreciated.

At the moment it is mostly GitHub-flavored markdown. We did consider Pandoc-flavor, but for the time being we are sticking to GitHub's. We might change it slightly. So far, 80% of our users have authored in LaTeX so we have been busy supporting that

Thanks John. Authorea founder here. First off, I have tried writelatex for the first time just a couple of weeks ago and it really works great to create beautiful documents. Great work.

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.

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

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!

yep, git access and offline mode are two features that are coming real soon. thanks again!

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

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.

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.

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.