Authorea's Blog
Blogging for the 21st Century
Solutions and Services for the Future of Scholarly Publishing Spotlight Series
Alberto Pepe
and 1 collaborator
Is Authorea FAIR?
Alberto Pepe
and 1 collaborator
Scientific collaboration in the era of COVID-19
Alberto Pepe
and 4 collaborators
1,000+ preprints and counting
Alberto Pepe
and 2 collaborators
A preprint is the fastest and most effective way to share early research findings with the scientific community and the public.
NEW! A redesigned equation editor
Alberto Pepe
Embedding videos, music, and other rich media
Alberto Pepe
Insert -> Rich Media
. Then paste a URL.What's new? What are we working on? Authorea's Product Roadmap 2020 🗓
Alberto Pepe
and 3 collaborators
Host articles, preprints, files, data, code, more
Alberto Pepe
and 1 collaborator
DOIs are now free! One-click publishing for preprints, articles, data and code
Alberto Pepe
and 1 collaborator
Writing a response to reviewers
Alberto Pepe
You recently submitted your first manuscript for publication, and you were pleased when the editor decided to send the manuscript out for peer review. Now you have gotten the reviews back, and the editor has asked you to revise your manuscript in light of the reviewers' comments. How should you tackle this task?
Use typography to help the reviewer navigate your response:Use changes of typeface, color, and indenting to discriminate between 3 different elements: the review itself, your responses to the review, and changes that you have made to the manuscript.
Our Product Roadmap 2018-2019 🗓
Alberto Pepe
and 1 collaborator
What the future of research writing and publishing could look like
Josh Nicholson
Getting Started with Authorea🚶
Josh Nicholson
and 1 collaborator
Up-Goer Five Challenge: Explain Your Research Using the Ten Hundred Most Common Words
Josh Nicholson
“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
The most powerful platform for scientific blogging 💪
Josh Nicholson
and 3 collaborators
Q&A with protocols.io
Josh Nicholson
and 4 collaborators
Authorea and the American Association for Cancer Research Partner to Streamline Research Editing & Publishing
Josh Nicholson
and 2 collaborators
Authorea and BioRxiv partner to bring preprints into 21st century
Josh Nicholson
and 4 collaborators
Turn-key research writing and publishing with Authorea for groups and teams
Josh Nicholson
and 2 collaborators
Authorea and SSRN Partner to Offer Authors a Better Way to Write and Edit Documents
Josh Nicholson
and 4 collaborators
The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv
Alberto Pepe
and 2 collaborators
The American Astronomical Society & Authorea Partner for Enhanced Collaborative Document Editing and Direct Submission
Josh Nicholson
and 3 collaborators
From Collaborative Authoring to Collaborative Reviewing
Josh Nicholson
and 1 collaborator
The Society for Neuroscience & Authorea Partner for One-Click Submissions
Josh Nicholson
The Preprint Citation Bump
Matteo Cantiello
and 2 collaborators
Why the ArXiv of the future will look like Authorea
Alberto Pepe
and 1 collaborator
Three Scientific Papers With Pets as Authors 🐾
Josh Nicholson
and 2 collaborators
Opening Citations to Open Research
Josh Nicholson
and 1 collaborator
Rockefeller University Press & Authorea Make Collaboration and Submission Easier For Authors Through Partnership
Josh Nicholson
and 2 collaborators
American Geophysical Union and Authorea Partner to Offer One-Click Submission of Manuscripts
Josh Nicholson
Introducing the 21st-century preprint: HTML, versioned, citable, data-rich.
Josh Nicholson
and 2 collaborators
A New Version Control System for Research Writing
Josh Nicholson
and 2 collaborators
Without Data, Are We Just Telling Nice Stories?
Josh Nicholson
"If people had deposited raw data and full protocols at the time of publication, we wouldn’t have to go back to the original authors," says Iorns. That would make it much easier for scientists to truly check each other’s work.- The Atlantic
The Fitbit of Research Writing
Josh Nicholson
eLife and Authorea Partner to Simplify Submission For Authors
Josh Nicholson
and 1 collaborator
Sample of Science and Authorea Partner for Better Writing Experience
Josh Nicholson
and 1 collaborator
Introducing the Editor of the Future
David Banys
and 3 collaborators
Authorea: accelerating discovery through online collaboration
Alberto Pepe
Authorea Researcher Spotlight: Achintya Rao
Josh Nicholson
Introducing Our New Editor
Josh Nicholson
and 1 collaborator
There is a chance that the Beta Editor is already active for your account. Want to turn it on? Go to your User Settings, then click Editor Preferences and if available, select your Default Editor to be Beta. Every new article you will create from the top navbar (Create New) will be in Authorea Beta.
The death of the term paper, the rise of students as authors.
Josh Nicholson
Authorea Acquires Scientific Publisher The Winnower
Josh Nicholson
and 1 collaborator
What might peer review look like in 2030? Find out at SpotOn16.
Karolina Mosiadz
Creating a domino effect: what can we all do, however small, to make research more open and reproducible?
Karolina Mosiadz
Open Sourcing Our Exporter
Josh Nicholson
and 1 collaborator
A common workflow in submitting scientific work to a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or conference, is to adhere to specially provided submission guidelines. To many this story is painfully familiar: your document must satisfy a long enumeration of requirements, including an official citation style, font face, margin and font sizes, single- or multi-column, frontmatter arrangements, ... The list goes on.
The work on styling a finished document alone is known to take anywhere from a day to a week, irrespective of which tool you used - Word and LaTeX users alike had to sweat it out. What makes this situation a nightmare rather than an annoyance, however, is that more often than not a manuscript is rejected and needs to be resubmitted to a different venue, where this tedious procedure needs to be repeated from scratch. And that process can repeat for several iterations. As academics are urged to publish their work as quickly and often as possible, this type of friction accumulates.
Essay Contest: How has social media enhanced your research?
Alberto Pepe
The Value of Ignorance in Science
Lucy Chen
and 3 collaborators
Reinventing Peer Review
Josh Nicholson
Do the right thing: 11 Courageous Retractions
Josh Nicholson
and 3 collaborators
6 Publisher Policies Antithetical to Research
Josh Nicholson
and 3 collaborators
65 out of the 100 most cited papers are paywalled.
Josh Nicholson
and 1 collaborator
The web was built specifically to share research papers amongst scientists. Despite this being the first goal of the modern web, most research is still published behind a paywall. We have recently highlighted famous math papers that reside behind a paywall as well as ten papers that have achieved a near rockstar status in research and the public. Here we systematically look at the top one hundred cited papers of all time and find that 65% of these papers are not open. Stated another way, the world’s most important research is inaccessible from the majority of the world.
A few facts about the top 100 cited papers:
The weighted average of all the paywalls is: $32.33, rounding to the nearest cent.
There are 1, 088, 779 citations of the Open Access articles, so, if they cost the same on average as the Paywalled articles and were paid for individually, they would cost a total of: $35, 199, 108.44–that’s 14 Bugatti Veyrons, or enough to buy everyone in New York City a Starbucks Tall coffee and chocolate chip cookie. In comparison, the total amount for the paywalled articles, assuming everyone bought the paywalled articles individually, is $54, 722, 252.80.
That’s 23 Bugatti Veyrons, or enough to buy everyone in New York City a footlong from Subway.
Although 65% of the most cited papers are paywalled, only 61% of those paper’s citations are from paywalled journals. Thus the open access articles in this list are, on average, cited more than the paywalled ones.
Paywalling the laws of the universe.
Michaeljdklein
and 1 collaborator
Pythagoras’ Theorem | a2 + b2 = c2 | Pythagoras, 530 BC | |
---|---|---|---|
Logarithms | logxy = logx + logy | John Napier, 1610 | |
Calculus | $\frac{\mathrm{d} f}{\mathrm{d} t} = \lim_{h \to 0} \frac{f(t~+~h)~-~f(t)}{h}$ | Newton, 1668 | |
Law of Gravity | $F = G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}$ | Newton, 1687 | |
The Square Root of Minus One | i2 = −1 | Euler, 1750 | |
Euler’s Formula for Polyhedra | V − E + F = 2 | Euler, 1751 | |
Normal Distribution | $\psi(x) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2 \pi \rho}} e^\frac{(x~-~\mu)^2}{2~\rho^2}$ | C. F. Gauss, 1810 | |
Wave Equation | $\frac{\partial^2 u}{\partial t^2} = c^2 \frac{\partial^2 u}{\partial x^2}$ | J. D‘Ambert, 1746 | |
Fourier Transform | f(ω)=∫−∞∞f(x)e−2 π i x ωdx | J. Fourier, 1822 | |
Navier-Stokes Equation | $\rho \left ( \frac{\partial \mathbf{v}}{\partial t} + \mathbf{v} \cdot \nabla \mathbf{v} \right ) = - \nabla p + \nabla \cdot T + f$ | C. Navier, G. Stokes, 1845 | |
Maxwell’s Equations | ∇ ⋅ E = 0 | J. C. Maxwell, 1865 | |
$\nabla \times E = - \frac{1}{e} \frac{\partial H}{\partial t}$ | |||
∇ ⋅ H = 0 | |||
$\nabla \times H = \frac{1}{e} \frac{\partial E}{\partial t}$ | |||
Second Law of Thermodynamics | dS ≥ 0 | L. Boltzmann, 1874 | PAYWALL |
Relativity | E = mc2 | Einstein, 1905 | PAYWALL |
Schrödinger’s Equation | $\mathrm{i} \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t} \psi = H \psi$ | E. Schrödinger, 1927 | PAYWALL |
Information Theory | H = −∑p(x)logp(x) | C. Shannon, 1949 | PAYWALL |
Chaos Theory | xt + 1 = k xt(1 − xt) | Robert May, 1975 | PAYWALL |
Black-Scholes Equation | $\frac{1}{2} \sigma^2 S^2 \frac{\partial^2 V}{\partial S^2} + r S \frac{\partial V}{\partial S} + \frac{\partial V}{\partial t} - r V = 0$ | F. Black, M. Scholes, 1990 | PAYWALL |
Euler’s Transformation | $\sum_{n = 0}^\infty (-1)^n a_n = \sum_{n=0}^\infty (-1)^n \frac{\Delta^n a_0}{2^{n+1}}$ | Euler, 1755 | PAYWALL |
Russell’s Paradox | Let R = {x ∣ x ∉ x}, then R ∈ R ⇔ R ∉ R | Russell, 1902 | |
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem | G(x):=¬Prov(sub(x, x)) ⇒ PA ⊢ G(⌜G⌝) ↔ ¬Prov(⌜G(⌜G⌝)⌝) | Gödel, 1931 |
Sweet, Sweet Irony: 7 Papers That Should be Open Access But Aren't
Josh Nicholson
and 2 collaborators
10 Famous Articles Still Behind a Paywall
Josh Nicholson
and 2 collaborators
Interactive and discoverable preprints
Josh Nicholson
and 3 collaborators
9th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival x Authorea
Lucy Chen
and 1 collaborator
"The Imagine Science Film Festival is a conversation between scientists, filmmakers, and artists to explore the latest scientific advances and theories in unique and thought-provoking ways." - Nate Dorr, Director of Programming
Research Olympics
Josh Nicholson
and 2 collaborators
8,249 more reasons to use Authorea
Josh Nicholson
Academics Turned Founders: Andrew Preston, Publons
Josh Nicholson
and 1 collaborator
What's Open Access Good For? Absolutely everything!
Josh Nicholson
and 4 collaborators
Scholarly Publishing: Unnecessarily Slow in the Modern Era.
Josh Nicholson
and 2 collaborators
What Really Happened: Fleming's Penicillin Discovery
Lucy Chen
What Really Happened: Darwin's Finches
Lucy Chen
Dear Social Media, Get DNA Chirality *Right*
Lucy Chen
and 1 collaborator
What Really Happened: Benjamin Franklin's Kite Experiment
Lucy Chen
All great truths begin as blasphemies: In Defense of "Silly" Research
Josh Nicholson
The Decline of Accuracy in Science Communication: Who is to Blame?
Lucy Chen
Authorea User Spotlight: Jenna Morgan Lang
Lucy Chen
and 1 collaborator
Nope! 8 Rejected Papers That Won the Nobel Prize
Josh Nicholson
Interdisciplinarity: Working Together Takes Work
Lucy Chen
A big challenge, but one that I enjoy, is that the important—many of the most societally relevant—problems can no longer be just solved with physics like for the transistor or biology like the for Polio vaccine. It is increasingly the case that we need to bring different groups of people together from very different disciplines to partner and tackle important problems. It is like the analogy that we can no longer act like golf or tennis players—we have to now think in terms of baseball or football. A baseball team will not be successful if it is full of shortstops.
Data Visualization: Create Powerful Infographics
Lucy Chen
and 1 collaborator
7 Crazy Things You Didn't Know About DNA
Lucy Chen
Secure Research Funding With Visuals
Lucy Chen
and 1 collaborator
Essay Contest: How has social media enhanced your research?
Josh Nicholson
and 5 collaborators
Authorea Spotlight: Viputheshwar Sitaraman (Draw Science)
Lucy Chen
Data Visualization: Tools for Creating Infographics
Lucy Chen
When the Obstacle is the Course: Job Security in Academia
Lucy Chen
This post is part of the series called Obstacles in Academia, which aims to highlight the many challenges young scientists face today.
Data Visualization: Intro to Infographics
Lucy Chen
and 1 collaborator
Authorea Partners with Italian Doctoral Association
Alberto Pepe
and 1 collaborator
Authorea Joins Microsoft 365 Education Solutions
Lucy Chen
MathML on the Web -- Please!
Deyan Ginev
Today I merged a pull request for which introduced the following setup for equation editing, as an alpha feature for our RichText editor:
The “status quo” renderer, displaying the mathematics on all “read-mode” article components.
A new renderer, specifically loaded in the iframe of our editor widget. Why? Because loading MathJax twice is too slow for our show, but we still want our displayed richtext equations to be, well, rich.
An additional math renderer, part of our equation-specific editing widget, so that authors can also input formulas in an appealing richtext flow.1 See the great demos by for examples.
You read that correctly - not one, not two, but three separate math renderers on the same HTML page, each of which different due to balancing on the trade-offs of performance, coverage and visualization.
I hear you cry:
– Well, this is clearly horrible design, simplify and streamline it!
Indeed! My thoughts exactly. But the great solution, the one that solves this problem not only for me, but for the entire math-on-the-web developer ecosystem, is not for me or my team to implement.
This renderer medley can be traced to a single root cause - the absence of ubiquitous support in modern browsers. If you are not familiar with MathML, it is a W3C and ISO standard and a core part of HTML5. MathML does a great job of providing a single language for representing mathematics in structured documents, especially web pages. But while we have that great language, we lack major browser implementations – in fact only Firefox has great MathML support, and has long been the browser-lead in math support.
A different perspective tells us that we are just two browsers short of having the tide turn overwhelmingly towards native rendering. I am referring specifically to and . Having native support would allow us – the mortal developers interested in providing exciting and powerful math-enabled web applications – to sleep calmly at night and work proudly at day. And hence my sincere plea to all major browser vendors:
Please, do the math.
P.S. How is the native MathML solution better?
Best. Performance. Possible.
Your browser will be capable to render MathML the moment it loads, just as it can CSS. No extra load times needed.
The DOM will set you free
As math-on-the-web developers, we need to select into and manipulate mathematical objects, just as all web developers need to manipulate forms and input fields. I want my cool math interactivity widget to be an easy drop-in for any webpage, just the same way that a jQuery widget is. And we can’t have that without equations being a proper participant in the HTML DOM – CSS would have never taken off if say <div>
and <span>
elements only existed for sites that had first loaded a third-party css.js
library.
Out-of-the-box Accessibility
Exposing the MathML source of an equation directly in its web page2 will be the default state of any HTML5 web page. Math-to-speech and Braille adaptors can then simply use the raw HTML as-is.
P.P.S. If you are interested in showing your personal support for adding native MathML, add your vote and voice to the public issues:
Edge MathML support:
https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-developer/suggestions/6508572-mathml
Chrome MathML support:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430
Personally, I have joined an effort to promote MathML publicly and to remind developers of its many strong suits and far-reaching benefits to the web develpment ecosystem. You can visit our MathML Association website, or follow us on Twitter at @mathml3.
Gravitational Waves and the Death of the PDF
Matteo Cantiello
and 1 collaborator
Einstein published in 1916 a paper containing the prediction of the existence of gravitational waves. It has just one author (A.E. himself) and consists of a few pages of text and equations \citep{1916SPAW.......688E}. Fast forward exactly 100 years, the LIGO collaboration announced in a paper that they observed what Einstein had predicted. The paper has more than 1000 co-authors and it condenses, in just a few pages of text, equations and figures, an enormous amount of technical information \citep{PhysRevLett.116.061102}.
How is Authorea different from ShareLaTeX and Overleaf?
Alberto Pepe
and 3 collaborators
How many scholarly articles are written in LaTeX?
Alberto Pepe
From Einstein to LIGO: 100 years of Science
Matteo Cantiello
and 1 collaborator
Einstein published in 1916 the paper containing the prediction of the existence of gravitational waves. It has just one author (A.E. himself) and consists of a few pages of text and equations \citep{1916SPAW.......688E}. Fast forward exactly 100 years, the LIGO collaboration announced in a paper that they observed what Einstein had predicted. The paper has more than 1000 co-authors and it condenses, in just a few pages of text, equations and figures, an enormous amount of technical information \citep{PhysRevLett.116.061102}.
The Einstein and LIGO papers that, respectively, predicted and observed gravitational waves are very similar in format. So much has changed in 100 years of science. So little has changed in 100 years of scientific publishing. The complexity of the LIGO experiment is astounding, as well as the details of what scientists needed to do to reach this milestone. Measuring a change in length equivalent to 1/1000 the diameter of a proton is not an easy endeavor.
And yet, the sheer technological and intellectual progress that we witnessed in the last century, with the rise of the internet and large scale computing, is not reflected in the methods we use to write up our science. Little has changed since the time of Einstein. Actually not much has changed since the time of Galileo either! Galileo is one of the founding fathers of the scientific method and one of the first people to ever publish a scientific paper in 1610. That’s 400+ years of scientific advancement and we’re still disseminating papers in paper format (or PDF, which is, really, just paper).
Why has scientific publishing changed so little? Scientific papers represent the de-facto currency of academia. Scholars need to publish in journals to get tenure, and in turn publishers have become the “banks” of the academic world. But the paper of the future should encapsulate all the exciting technological progress we have made. It should be interactive, multilayered and contain all the data and code required for the science described to be carefully reproduced. The LIGO group, together with some Open Science advocates, prepared and shared an amazing interactive document where everyone can play with the real data and pipeline used by the scientists to reach their final conclusions. However, this was not part of the original publication, the reason being that the format of the published article does not allow for such integration.
We created Authorea to address specifically this challenge. Authorea lives in the cloud and is meant to allow large collaborations to write science and easily integrate data, code and all the material needed to reproduce (and discuss) results. Authorea can allow the long-awaited leap that will move the scientific paper in the 21st century.
Authorea goes to Paris
Matteo Cantiello
and 1 collaborator
Great news! We're happy to announce that Authorea is one of the winners of the NYC-Paris Business Exchange competition. We'll be opening an Authorea office in Paris in March 2016. C'est génial!
Introducing real time chat for user support
Matteo Cantiello
and 1 collaborator
The Surfer's Guide to Gravitational Waves
Matteo Cantiello
In a nutshell: Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space time produced by violent events, like merging together two black holes or the explosion of a massive star. Unlike light (electromagnetic waves) gravitational waves are not absorbed or altered by intervening material, so they are very clean proxies of the physical process that produced them. They are expected to travel at the speed of light and, if detected, they could give precious information about the cataclysmic processes that originated them and the very nature of gravity. That’s why the direct detection of gravitational waves is such an important endeavor. Definitely worthy of a Nobel prize in physics.
Gravitational Waves: The First Swell!
Matteo Cantiello
A Big Discovery
On 14 September 2015 at 4:50:45 AM Eastern standard time, the LIGO experiment detected for the first time the passage of gravitational waves. Scientists saw a very specific pattern of stretching and compression of space-time called a “chirp”. The detection was done independently at the two locations of the experiment, one in Hanford (Washington) and the other one in Livingstone (Louisiana). This amazing discovery has occurred almost exactly 100 years after Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativy \citep{1916AnP...354..769E}, and represents the last verification of this beautiful theory of gravity.
How did the waves look like? Glassy and double-overhead!
Authorea Raises a new round of funding to Advance Open, Reproducible, Data-Driven Research
Alberto Pepe
Authorea is rapidly growing in fields outside of the hard sciences, such as genomics, environmental science, and computational biology. For example, in June 2015, a dedicated global team of epidemiology researchers began an ambitious project to track the Ebola virus using large-scale genome sequencing. Their groundbreaking research, written on Authorea, was published in the journal Cell and covered by the New York Times. The Authorea version of their article is the only place where readers can peruse the history, workflows, and research data connected with the study. Authorea is poised to shake up the stale academic publishing industry via an online platform that encourages data sharing, and a more open and transparent dissemination of research results complete with all the data sources necessary to reproduce them. Authorea plans to use the proceeds of this funding to encourage more open, data-driven research of this kind.
Concinnitas: The Art of the Equation
Matteo Cantiello
and 3 collaborators
San Francisco, CA – On view at Crown Point Press is an exhibition of etchings by scientists and mathematicians, September 4 - October 27, 2015.
We came across this set of beautiful etchings on Artsy depicting mathematical equations. We decided to reproduce them on Authorea, using our equation editor and some LaTeX. Here’s the result.