How does Authorea save time for scientists?

Researchers spend their days doing cutting-edge research and analysis. But when it comes time to writing, publishing, and disseminating their work, they’re often still using models and tools that haven’t changed much in decades, if not centuries. Authorea is a new collaborative, web-based platform that brings researchers a modern technological solution for writing, editing and publishing. It covers the research cycle from writing a first draft, through to submission and publication. Authorea lives online because we now live online. Authorea is built on Git - the most advanced version control system - so that versions of your documents are duly recorded and saved. Authorea is multi-format, meaning it supports the creation of mixed-format documents including LaTeX, markdown, and rich text. Authorea also lets you integrate data, code, and all the materials needed to reproduce scientific results in your papers. This lowers the technical barrier to sharing, paving the way for transparency and reproducibility---the pillars of the scientific method.

What have been the main challenges for Authorea?

Changing habits is hard. And scientists are particularly tough nuts to crack. In fact, we were asked to write this FAQ on a Google doc (we forgive you protocols.io team)! In some instances, we've been asked to send over a Word document for editing. We need to make life easier and more productive for researchers today with an eye towards improving the corpus of knowledge in the future--it's a balancing act in a way.

What are your 2-3 favorite efforts in terms of reproducibility? What are the tools that should be created in the future to make research more reproducible?

We want to help researchers create and disseminate their work online so that other tools can be built off of the content. Currently, data-mining and extraction of scientific knowledge from papers are very difficult to do given that papers are not written and published following a semantically-rich structure. In fact, much of research is locked in PDFs making text analysis extremely difficult. As we bring more and more research online, and in the open, there will be many opportunities to build tools that enhance reproducibility of research, many that we can't in any useful way predict.

What are your tips for young researchers joining the labs/young professors starting their?

Good luck! ;) We encourage you to use available online collaborative tools. Also - the future is open - create your content and data in an open environment! For example, if you are a new addition to a research lab, set up a research page for your lab here! Building an online presence for you and your lab is very important for recruitment, grants, and for public engagement.

Can you share 1-2 things in the queue of Authorea improvements/developments that you're excited about?

We recently revisited our "group" offering to support an increasing desire from users who want to see Authorea as a team-based collaborative workspace for documents. With the new group offering, users are able to share their documents privately and publicly with groups they are members of. A "group" can be an organization, a company, as well as a team, a lab, a journal club, or a class. Groups then, become a portal for documents, administered and managed by users. We also introduced the ability for group admins to customize the appearance of their group page and host it at a dedicated custom URL. So, now, if Dr. Jones' wants to have a dedicated group portal to showcase the research papers of his/her Microbiology Lab, they could get a page like the one below hosted at drjoneslab.com.