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.

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."##

Introduction to online markdown editorsOnline Markdown editors are increasing in popularity along with Markdown itself. Since 2004, Markdown has been increasing in use as a more functional and easier-to-write version of rich-text formatting. Markdown is popular across the web and online Markdown editors will continue to proliferate as long as there is interest in simple formatting for text on the web.Advantages of online markdown editorsMarkdown makes it really easy to apply formatting to text. Markdown covers the capabilities of HTML without the need for writing HTML tags, which can be a little annoying. As an example, to make an H1 heading in Markdown, you can simply write# some textand the markdown will render like this:

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).

NEW YORK, NY, January 18, 2016 -- Sample of Science and the collaborative writing platform Authorea have partnered to empower researchers around the world to share materials samples more efficiently. Development of novel materials is a growing area of research and the Sample of Science and the Authorea partnership makes it easier for researchers to write brief descriptions of their materials and share the samples with other scientists."Sample of Science is solving an important problem in the field of chemistry and materials sciences. We are happy that Authorea can serve as the writing platform for submissions to Sample of Science. If samples from experiments are made more openly accessible, it can help make research more efficient -- something we value greatly” said Alberto Pepe, CEO of Authorea. “Authorea and Sample of Science share a passion for giving researchers great tools that help them do better work.”Sharing samples of newly synthesized materials is an important step in the research cycle. For example, a carbon material developed in Berlin can subsequently be validated or utilized by research groups in Boston. Scientists who want to increase the visibility of their research and facilitate new experiments can write brief descriptions of their novel materials samples using the Authorea platform. All materials, together with brief descriptions, will be made available on the Sample of Science portal.Felix Evert, managing director of Sample of Science, is certain that the partnership will improve the research process for scientists who synthesize novel materials. “Better science is all about enabling researchers to disseminate the right information more efficiently. Authorea is an excellent digital writing tool. The lean online template for submission of brief sample descriptions is ideal for chemists and materials scientists who want to communicate their findings quickly," Evert explains. For more information, please visit: Sample of Science was founded in 2015 as a digital platform which connects researchers synthesizing novel materials with researchers who need them. The platform publishes open access description of novel materials and facilitates interdisciplinary collaborations based on materials from experiments. The company is located at the Freie Universität Berlin which is also one of the first cooperation partners of Sample of Science. www.sampleofscience.com    Felix Evert    Phone +49 162 276 2928    [email protected] is the online document editor for researchers that is accelerating scientific discover. Authorea is trusted worldwide by leading researchers writing and publishing content in every discipline, from astrophysics to zoology. The online document editor supports a wide range of markup languages and scientific integrations, including the most popular citation management, graphing, and visualization plugins. www.authorea.com    Adyam Ghebre    Phone +1 646 598-9285    [email protected]

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.

Deciding between ShareLaTeX and Overleaf? Choosing the right editor for your LaTeX manuscript is not easy. Here are some key comparison points that showcase how Authorea is different from both. 

What kind of apps are available for reading and writing research articles?Scientists, researchers, and scholars now have available apps that make reading and writing articles easier than its ever been before. Many such apps have made their way into other fields and industries and now the same are available to the scientific community.

Use Authorea for technical writingAuthorea is an online collaborative document editor used by scientists. It can also be used for writing technical documents. In fact, the feature set is built for research. This makes Authorea perfect for writing lengthy and complex technical documents of any kind. Some of the most important tools for technical writing are as follows:Mathematical equations, chemical formulae, full LaTeX support

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.

At Authorea we have big goals, not necessarily for ourselves, but for researchers and the scientific community. We envision a world where researchers write and publish their work openly, they include their data inside of interactive figures and seek collaborators and the community to test their work to ensure it is robust. Communication and publishing is dynamic and modern and research moves more efficiently because researchers move more efficiently. This vision may sound idealistic but it is being realized and we are diligently working to build a platform and community to foster it.  Over the last year we have taken tremendous steps towards creating the place to write and disseminate research. We relaunched our new editor only a few months ago and have redesigned nearly every part of Authorea to make it the best place to write research documents, for all researchers.  We've added direct submission to a growing list of leading journals, have introduced the first and only place to preprint in HTML, and introduced a new version control system for writing research papers.  In short, we've done a lot, really fast.We're going to continue to keep innovating but we're taking a brief pause from introducing new features to focus on reliability, usability, and research support. That means, we want to hear from you. What could we do better? What small or big changes on Authorea would help you be more efficient at research writing and publishing? Below are just some of the major highlights of what we've accomplished in the last few months, which do not include the bugs here and there and tweaks made based on user feedback/testing.  Acquire Research Publisher, The Winnower--LinkNew HomepageLaunch Authorea Beta, our new editor--Linkreal-time collaborationautosaveability to write in Markdown, LaTeX, and rich-text all within one articlenew toolbarPartner with Sample of Science--LinkPartner with eLife for direct submission--LinkImproved UX for LaTeX and Markdown rendering.Improved Author Management controlAdd multi-cite capability/improve design UX of citation tool.New pricing--LinkNew browse page--LinkIntroduce new version control system for research writing--LinkNew features page--LinkIntroduce preprinting capabilities and ability to issue DOI on Authorea--LinkAdd \labels, \refs, New commenting system

Are you comparing Mendeley to other reference managers?Choosing the right reference manager for your scholarly documents is very important. Mendeley is a modern reference and PDF management system. Authorea is a word processor with an integrated reference management system. Authorea's reference management system is seamlessly integrate inside the word processor so that you don't even have to worry about managing references anymore. In this article, we list a few key comparison points that show how Mendeley and Authorea are different.

What does it take to master article writing?

Online collaboration is a requirement for modern scientific research, but web-based tools are lagging other industriesTo John Sexton, the 15th president of New York University, Science is Now a Vast Global Enterprise -- one that requires substantial international cooperation and modern tools to accomplish this cooperation. The internet age has brought collaborative advancements to many technical fields -- but the tools to write research have been puzzlingly left behind.As we questioned in an essay in Scientific American last year:How come the internet age has yet to deliver a collaborative writing and publishing tool for research?With research papers gaining more coauthors each year, it's important to have tools that support collaborative technical writing in an environment that is native to the web.Is research becoming more collaborative?According to The Economist, the answer is a firm yes. 

Introduction to document editorsA document editor or word processor is a software application that helps write, edit, format, and publish documents. A document editor differs from a text editor in that it is purpose-built for creating human-readable documents -- rather than simply for modifying text or code snippets. If you look at virtually any industry -- education, research, business, and so on -- document editors are more or less ubiquitous. The most popular document editors globally are Microsoft Word and Google Docs, but it wasn't always that way.History of the document editor

Write, edit, submit, revise, resubmit, resubmit, resubmit, resubmit.... Okay, you get the point: we send our manuscripts to lots of journals. The time formatting and reformatting manuscripts is a pain and it is one we are working to ease.  Your valuable time should be spent on your research, not tiresome formatting.  Today, we've added 8,249 article templates to Authorea! With the addition of these templates we now make it easy for you to write your article for just about any journal out there. We hope you won't submit to all 8,000+ different journals but at least you now have the power to do so!  We've also made it easy for users to create their own templates, so if you see a template missing, please feel free to create one.So...How does it work? It couldn't be any simpler. Just browse our template section for inspiration. Don't start from scratch. Our templates give you a mold that you can shape to your liking. Working feverishly on a research paper, grant proposal, university thesis or a class project? We do them all. Focus on your writing on the web, and enjoy Authorea's single streamlined web view of scholarly text. Once finished, you're truly finished - forget about formatting issues. With just a couple of clicks through our Export flow, you're ready to send in that submission!  Authorea's journal templates follow correct citations guidelines outlined by the journals, at no extra effort for our authors.We're really just getting started. If you need to send a printout to a colleague in draft shape, line-numbered and double-spaced, it's a selection away. Different journal? Same breeze. Your text, data, visuals, and citations will be updated automatically behind the scenes. In the unlikely event you hit a hurdle, our 24/7 support team will be happy to quality control your article and quickly get it back on the fast track to getting published.This is the first step towards making the writing and publication process as seamless as possible but we've got lot's more coming. We hope you'll join us so that we can make scholarly writing and publishing more effective and more enjoyable. Happy writing!

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.

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.