Alberto_Pepe
Co-Founder | Authorea

Hey Nate- thanks for the question. I hope your Ph.D. is going well! Authorea was born out of frustration for the way science is written, disseminated and published. I met my co-founder, also a physicist while I was working at CERN. We were both writing research papers and hating the process. To be precise, we were loving doing research (collecting and crunching data, writing code, etc) but the moment we had to start writing a paper we realized that there was no tool out there that enabled collaborative writing in a way that made sense to us. While having dinner with Nate (years after CERN) in a cool Neapolitan pizza joint, I shared my idea and frustration with Nate and he said "Damn! Why isn't there a Github for scientific papers?". That was roughly the beginning of Authorea. It was also a good pizza.

It is no secret that Authorea is more appealing to younger scholars: 25 to 45 years old. (I am hoping 45 is considered "young"). We have elder academics using Authorea too and they tend to fall in two categories: 1) "cool" professors and researchers who are always at the forefront of technology, 2) scholars who are curious to know what the younger generation of scientists are doing. Our platform is quite simple to use and it is getting even better (very very soon, it is going to be really awesome). We are here to facilitate writing needs of all researchers. Even if the learning curve is steeper for some, we're happy to take the time to help anyone who is willing to give us a try.