Matthew Sundquist edited Intro.md  over 10 years ago

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At [Plotly](Plot.ly), we are excited about the collaboration that Authorea can power. Plotly is about making data analysis and visualization collaborative; Authorea is about making publication collaborative. Plotly and Authorea together can change the way you collaborate on your data analysis, visualization, and publication.   We need a collaborative resource for analyzing, visualizing, and sharing data. As of January 9, 2014, Wikipedia [reports](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics) having 4,420,275 articles. GitHub recently [announced](https://github.com/blog/1724-10-million-repositories) having 10 million public repositories. What Wikipedia and GitHub do for content and code, Plotly aims to do for data and graphs.  ## 1.1 Plotly solves three problems:  * First, to query a database, clean data, analyze data, graph results, share the project, and discuss a project, you have to use too many tools, file types, and technologies. Switching between the jumbles is inefficient, painful, and chaotic.  

* Second, collaborating requires emailing a data set, script, graphs, screenshots, and explanations to your team then re-doing that work based on feedback (_e.g.,_"see the arrow in the screenshot").   _Solution_. Plotly lets you edit graphs and datasets work  with others online, commenting onyour  projects and saving revisions. * Third, when you look at a graph in a deck or paper, you can't see or access the data behind it. That means you can't reproduce or validate results, or make your own new dataset or graph  by combining data. adding or changing data in your own saved version. This problem gets worse with time; a recent study [recent study](www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=where-have-all-the-data-gone-13-12-19) showed that, twenty years after publication in 1991, 80 percent of data used in scientific papers was no longer available. It makes sense: the data was probably stored on a computer long since replaced.  _Solution_. Plotly keeps your hosts  data, code, and graphs together in one place together, and lets you fork your own version of any graph you see  (see _e.g.,_ [this Washington Post article](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/14/do-low-taxes-on-the-rich-leave-the-middle-class-with-lower-wages/)). Plotly and Authorea can ensure continuity of and free access to and data, scholarship, and graphs.  ## 1.2 Key Features: How Plotly solves these problems