A document by Josh Nicholson. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Josh Nicholson. Click on the document to view its contents.

Authorea is on a mission to build the best research document editor and publishing platform ever made. We believe that the best way to accelerate scientific discovery is to give full control of document creation and distribution to the researcher, and that the best way to do that is to build a web-based editor that enables researchers to collaborate and disseminate their work seamlessly.Authorea,  like many research projects, started with a question: Why is the research writing process so slow? We started with the rough notion that the internet age was failing to deliver optimal tools for things like collaborative writing and submitting works to publishers.  We refined this core idea and launched Authorea two years ago.Since then, we've devoted tens of thousands of hours to understand how to build software that makes it easier for researchers to do groundbreaking work. At the beginning of this year, we started building our new editor -- Authorea Beta -- the editor that will bring Authorea to the mainstream to benefit researchers in every discipline.Today, we're happy to share with you Authorea Beta. Writing research online has tremendous potential for collaboration, dissemination, and discovery. We're here to bring writing online to researchers and we'll be with you every step. 

Authorea was built to foster collaboration amongst researchers writing together.  Founded, built, and tested by physicists and engineers, our editor was initially geared towards heavy technical writing. In short, we were built to make it easy to write Markdown and LaTeX collaboratively online, because selfishly that was how we (n=3) wrote our own papers.  As the platform grew and we began to realize the full potential of Authorea we realized how limited our goals would be if we only helped LaTeX and Markdown authors. Indeed, even if all the LaTeX writers in the world were writing with us, that would only represent a small fraction of researchers. We wanted to make research more robust, data-driven, and open for all researchers. We came to the conclusion to totally rewrite our editor, to make it accessible to researchers in humanities, life sciences, social sciences, as well as in math, physics, and engineering.  It's a hard problem to build an editor that accommodates such a diversity of writers but with the continuing increase in cross-discipline collaboration \cite{Luke_2014,Dhand_2016} we felt it a worthwhile problem.

Today, we're happy to announce the release of a new and improved ability to track changes on Authorea.  Based on git, the most sophisticated version control system available today, researchers using Authorea can now see word by word edits from co-authors or a per-day summary of changes made.  Because the version control system is built into the document creation process and not simply added on, like track changes used in Word or Google Docs, the full life cycle of a paper will be available. Such functionality will make collaborating and editing even easier amongst researchers on Authorea, accelerating the time it takes to report your findings and saving your inbox from the deluge of emails with different versions of the same paper that is typical of collaboration in other editors, like Word.

BackgroundJingjing Liang is Assistant Professor of Forest Ecology at West Virginia University. He is Coordinator of the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative (GFBI), an international, multi-stakeholder team of foresters and forest scientists supporting cutting-edge research and policy making in forest sciences and related areas.Jingjing is also the lead author of GFBI's first major scientific paper: Positive biodiversity-productivity relationship predominant in global forests \cite{Liang_2016}. The paper, which was written collaboratively in Authorea by a team of over eighty researchers, was published in the the Oct. 14, 2016 issue of Science.InterviewAuthorea: Congratulations on publishing in Science! How long has this paper been in the works?Jingjing Liang: We started the data compilation and analysis in October 2015, and completed the first draft in May, 2016. That being said, our data collection work started a few years ago.Authorea: Your team analyzed a forest inventory of more than 777,000 sample plots in 44 countries containing more than 30 million trees, making this one of the first attempts to gain a global perspective on the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem productivity. Can you contextualize this accomplishment for us?Jingjing Liang: Sure, forest inventory data are among the most expensive data to collect on this planet, because 1) it takes skilled and experienced foresters to do the work, and 2) the transportation and related logistics to and from the sites make an inventory trip very costly. According to my rough estimate, measuring 100 plots in remote areas cost $50,000 per year, so, the measurement of all the GFBI plots alone would cost US$400,000,000. GFBI plot data consist one of the largest ground-sourced data set in the world, and would be valuable in many applications from policy making to research support.Authorea: You argue that the worldwide productivity of forests decreases at an accelerating rate with the loss of biodiversity -- does this mean essentially that it's less costly to preserve biodiversity than it is not to?Jingjing Liang: Yes, also because we have shown in the article that conserving biodiversity can lead to potential forestry dividends that would far exceed the annual cost of effective biodiversity conservation worldwide.Authorea: What do you see for the future of biodiversity-productivity relationship (BPR) analyses?Jingjing Liang: BPR analyses would thrive in two fronts- big data and controlled experiments. The big data approach addresses the observed patterns in natural ecosystems, whereas the experiments addresses the mechanisms behind the foregoing patterns.Authorea: Your paper contained 84 authors in total. How did you coordinate the writing and work with such a large group? Were there advantages and disadvantages to such a collaboration that you faced?Jingjing Liang: It is very challenging and takes lots of patience and respect to others. It  is difficult to please everyone, or anyone in that matter, but science takes collaboration, and collaboration takes mutual respect, compromise, and even sacrifice.Authorea: Was there a key reason why you decided to write your article on Authorea?  What were some of the features you liked?Jingjing Liang: We needed a platform that facilitates manuscript development by a large group. Authorea proves to be the platform that we need. It is easy to register and easy to use. The only thing I would recommend is to set the default of "email each comment to everyone" option to "email none", for a large-group collaboration.For more information on the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative, please visit: http://www.gfbinitiative.org/research

BROOKLYN, NY, NOVEMBER 10, 2016 --Authorea (http://www.authorea.com), the online collaborative platform for researchers, today announced it has acquired The Winnower (https://www.thewinnower.com), a pioneering research publisher that offers advanced publishing tools to individual authors.With the acquisition, Authorea enhances the foremost online platform for researchers to write, cite, collaborate, host data, and publish all in one place. The acquisition follows a financing round led by Lux Capital and joined by Bloomberg Beta, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, TechHammer, ff Venture Capital, and New York Angels."We are building a powerful toolset for researchers to collaborate," said Authorea CEO Dr. Alberto Pepe. “We're supporting a research model that puts the author first, allowing him or her to write technical research documents online -- with a data layer underneath -- and to control fully the output and dissemination of that effort. We're pleased to welcome aboard the team at The Winnower, which will help provide additional publishing options to our researchers."The Winnower, founded by Dr. Joshua Nicholson in 2014, is a leading publisher of preprints and grey literature -- outputs that are often overlooked by traditional publishers."The Winnower offers traditional research publishing tools, such as a digital object identifier and permanent archival, to non-traditional documents like Reddit r/science Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) transcripts, blog posts, preprints, grant applications, citizen science reports, and more," said Dr. Nicholson. "We're delighted to join the forward-thinking team at Authorea. We share the mission of accelerating scientific discovery through superior research communication tools, and a big part of that is providing authors the tools to control their research from initial spark to output."##

Last Thursday, September 22nd, we held our 5th New York open science meetup (#opensciencenyc). Science journalists, Columbia faculty members, and enthusiasts from our open science meetup group came out to hear Dr. Stuart Firestein talk about ignorance in scientific research and why it is necessary and valuable (yes, you read that right).

A new eraFall marks a new era for Authorea. Summer was already very eventful -- 8,200+ custom journal templates, increased rendering speed, dictionary support for new languages, improved article metadata, better import and export functionality, and many more improvements (see our product roadmap). Fall is going to be even more eventful! We are launching a modern design and an improved rich-text editor! Our editor "rewrite" marks the culmination of months of work and it is the biggest project we've undertaken since founding Authorea. We hope you'll like it.We'll be rolling out the new Editor to all our users over the next few weeks after our private beta test. You'll get a message very soon with a link to opt-in. Here are some of the updates we think you’ll find exciting:A modern new lookIt took a long time but we finally have a dashing new look: familiar and easy to use like most modern word processors, and at the same time perfectly tailored for the writing needs of researchers. And this is just the beginning. We will continue improving your reading and writing experience.

When you're reinventing the research article you will continually need to be reinventing yourself. That's what we've been doing over the last few months, reinventing one of our core features -- our editor.Today, we're happy to announce that we are inviting researchers to a private test of our new editor. We created a new editor because we listened to our users, and we're going to make it even better by listening to our users once again. If you're interested in joining our private beta please send us an email at [email protected]. We will be limiting our trial to 100 users and will be selecting researchers from a diverse set of backgrounds.We're very excited to share what we're working on with our users. Here's to a better research writing experience -- here's to the future. 

Retraction Watch is a blog that tracks retractions in science -- and it's probably a site you never want your research to be on. To many, retracting your work means that you've committed fraud, and in most cases can be the end of a researcher's career. However, that's not always the case: in fact, retracting your work for the right reasons can even be good for your career and good for science (Lu 2013). Retraction Watch highlights cases where scientists did not retract their work due to fraud, but rather because it was "the right thing."  Here we take the opportunity to further highlight these pieces and the courageous scientists that did the right thing despite an enormous stigma.We believe the future of scholarly communication will be more dynamic than it is today. By definition, this will require more corrections and retractions.  Authorea was built to show the full history of a document, from creation to final publication. We allow annotations of the literature and believe that a more dynamic and robust form of communication is the future -- it's what we're building. Join us!

How researchers communicate with one another and the world has changed very little over the last 350 years. Attempts to improve the process have been implemented throughout the years, not all of which have been to the benefit of research. Here we highlight some policies implemented by various publishers that we believe are antithetical to research communication and what we're doing to try to fix them.

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: 1. The weighted average of all the paywalls is: $32.33, rounding to the nearest cent. 2. 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. 3. That’s 23 Bugatti Veyrons, or enough to buy everyone in New York City a footlong from Subway. 4. 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.

What better way to argue for the benefits of open access than to publish a research paper with restricted access rights? While open access has been shown to be beneficial for researchers and the public by numerous studies (some of which are listed below), these same papers make it pretty self-evident that the move to full open access is going to take some time. It is true that more and more open access articles appear each year -- some predict that the volume of open access publications will overtake subscription publications by 2018 -- yet despite the increase in publishers and researchers adopting open access as a modus operandi, paywalls still remain on the vast majority of articles, including many which tout the benefits of open research. The following is a list of articles that while advocating for open research remain, ironically, behind paywalls:

Some research findings have permeated all parts of our culture -- so much so that we often take the actual ideas and access to them for granted. Would you believe that Einstein's "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?" remains behind a paywall, despite being more than 100 years old? Here we show 10 famous papers that have achieved a similar "rockstar" status in the public imagination yet are still subject to paywalls. At Authorea, we believe that open communication is the key to advancing research. We're working every day to make it possible for researchers to have full control over their work and its dissemination. 

The 2016 Olympics have captivated the world -- records are breaking, medal counts are climbing, and nationalism is roaring! It's all very exciting. It should get even more exciting in Tokyo in four years time at the 2020 games when several new sports are scheduled to be introduced, including surfing, skateboarding, and... research! Okay, research definitely won't be included, but what if it were? How would each country fare? Here we look at research output vs. Olympic prowess on a per-country basis.

Scholarly communication is advancing culturally and technologically towards a better future.  There are an increasing number of disciplines and people publishing their content under open-access licenses, publishing their work as preprints, and publishing different types of content from data to posters to single figures. We're happy to be part of this push towards a more dynamic and transparent system of communication. In fact, it's one of the reasons we exist--to improve how leading researchers and student's alike communicate their ideas amongst each other and to the world. These are the world's most important ideas, how we communicate them is important.

The 2016 Olympics have captivated the world -- records are breaking, medal counts are climbing, and nationalism is roaring! It's all very exciting. It should get even more exciting in Tokyo in four years time at the 2020 games when several new sports are scheduled to be introduced, including surfing, skateboarding, and... research! Okay, research definitely won't be included, but what if it were? How would each country fare? Here we look at research output vs. Olympic prowess on a per-country basis.