What is your mission?
We founded Authorea with the mission of accelerating and opening up scientific discovery. We were frustrated that a writing tool didn't fully suit the needs of researchers -- especially researchers in a web-first, data-driven world. Our mission is to reinvent how research documents are written and shared to capture the power of the web. In short, we allow researchers to create 21st century documents for 21st century research.
What is the story behind Authorea?
Authorea was started by two physicists, Alberto Pepe and Nathan Jenkins, who met while working at CERN in Geneva. CERN is the birthplace of the World Wide Web. The web was initially created to be a scientific information network that would allow researchers to share and disseminate scientific insights as fast as possible . The web today touches many facets of our lives: we produce massive volumes of content for the web, in HTML. Yet, scientific information is by and large still written, published and exchanged in formats which are not fully web compatible. PDFs and Microsoft Word documents, for example, are printer-centric rather than web-centric. Our plan with Authorea was to bring the writing process and its products (scientific manuscripts) to the web.
We're a
small group of former researchers from variety of different backgrounds, including life sciences, physics, math, computer science, and even the classics!