Great news! We're happy to announce that Authorea is one of the winners of the NYC-Paris Business Exchange competition. We'll be opening an Authorea office in Paris in March 2016. C'est génial!       

Do you have a question, problem, idea, bug report or feedback about your Authorea experience? To provide better and faster support for all our users, we recently added a real time chat feature. Go to any document (yes, this one included) and just look for the help chat icon (the speech bubble in the lower right corner), click on it and start a conversation with one of our experts. Ask them anything, they solve problems!

IN A NUTSHELL: Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space time produced by violent events, like merging together two black holes or the explosion of a massive star. Unlike light (electromagnetic waves) gravitational waves are not absorbed or altered by intervening material, so they are very clean proxies of the physical process that produced them. They are expected to travel at the speed of light and, if detected, they could give precious information about the cataclysmic processes that originated them and the very nature of gravity. That’s why the direct detection of gravitational waves is such an important endeavor. Definitely worthy of a Nobel prize in physics.

A BIG DISCOVERY On 14 September 2015 at 4:50:45 AM Eastern standard time, the LIGO experiment detected for the first time the passage of gravitational waves. Scientists saw a very specific pattern of stretching and compression of space-time called a “chirp”. The detection was done independently at the two locations of the experiment, one in Hanford (Washington) and the other one in Livingstone (Louisiana). This amazing discovery has occurred almost exactly 100 years after Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativy , and represents the last verification of this beautiful theory of gravity. How did the waves look like? Glassy and double-overhead!

Hi friends! We're happy to announce today that we raised another round of funding to make Authorea better and advance Open, data-driven science and scholarship. This financing round is led by Lux Capital, a VC firm with an incredible track record and reputation in the scientific and academic fields. They recently referred to Scientists as the new rebels! Among the new investors, we also welcome on board Knight Foundation which supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the art. Awesome! The full Press Release of the announcement is included below. (Oh, and we're hiring!)Press Release. (Link) NEW YORK --- Authorea, the fastest growing science collaboration and publishing platform, today announced that it has closed a $1.5 million financing to deliver valuable new tools and capabilities to scholars and researchers across the world. The financing was led by Lux Capital, a venture firm that invests specifically in counter-conventional science & technology companies, along with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to supporting transformational ideas that foster informed and engaged communities. Earlier seed investors ff Venture Capital and New York Angels also participated in the round.Authorea.com is the leading collaboration platform to write, share, and discuss research – all in real-time. It was created in 2013 by Dr. Alberto Pepe, a Harvard astrophysicist, and Dr. Nathan Jenkins, a UC Berkeley physicist, who met while working at CERN and were disappointed by the slow, inefficient, and obsolete ways by which research papers are written and disseminated.Authorea is currently used by more than 80,000 scholars across 70 countries, in fields as diverse as physics, astronomy and computer science. The company offers users a collaborative online editing platform tailored for academic and technical writing – a word processor, which makes adding citations and equations and formatting references incredibly simple. Authorea is built on a Github-style model and every document created is a Git repository. This allows users to track changes in documents in a very granular way and to easily integrate data into documents.“We’re extremely excited to welcome Lux Capital and Knight Foundation as new investors,” said Authorea co-founder Dr. Pepe. “Both have strong reputations and excellent track records in backing transformational companies in science and technology.”Authorea allows researchers and academics of all kinds to share findings, lessons and data, creating richer, more quality information," said Ben Wirz, Knight Foundation director for venture investments. “By enabling collaboration, it can serve as a building block for more knowledgable communities and drive new discoveries and innovations.""All economic growth depends on new discoveries, which depend on science,” said Adam Goulburn, PhD, Partner at Lux Capital and Authorea Board member. “Authorea is taking on the science of science itself – how it's researched, reviewed, produced, and published. Whether taking on the crisis of reproducibility or shortening the time from discovery to market, Authorea is an indispensable tool spanning breakthroughs from the cosmos to cancer.""The future of science rests on powerful methods for collaborating on open and reproducible research – Authorea is leading the way to make this happen,” said Sam Arbesman, PhD, Scientist in Residence at Lux. “What Github did for software developers, Authorea is doing for scientists. Forget stale research stuck in static journals, Authorea catalyzes real-time collaborations and sparks curiosity and creativity in the scientific method. Whether powerfully handling formulas, figures, comments, research results or references – it is a game-changer and competitive edge for any scientist.”Authorea is rapidly growing in fields outside of the hard sciences, such as genomics, environmental science, and computational biology. For example, in June 2015, a dedicated global team of epidemiology researchers began an ambitious project to track the Ebola virus using large-scale genome sequencing. Their groundbreaking research, written on Authorea, was published in the journal Cell and covered by the New York Times. The Authorea version of their article is the only place where readers can peruse the history, workflows, and research data connected with the study. Authorea is poised to shake up the stale academic publishing industry via an online platform that encourages data sharing, and a more open and transparent dissemination of research results complete with all the data sources necessary to reproduce them. Authorea plans to use the proceeds of this funding to encourage more open, data-driven research of this kind.

About the Authors

What’s the deal about public vs. private articles? You can write public articles for free, but you have to pay to write private articles? That’s like saying you can go to the beach for free, but you have to pay to wear a swimsuit. True! But after all, they're not giving away swimsuits for free at Macy's :)We, at Authorea, are a small company with a big vision. We're all recovering researchers (mostly Ph.D.s in physics and computer science) and are on a mission to make research better. We built Authorea because we were annoyed by the slowness and inefficiencies of writing research in collaboration and publishing it, in scholarly journals. We believe that we built a product (you are looking at it) that is both useful (it makes collaborative writing faster, more seamless, and a bit less painful) and also visionary in its nature (we deconstructed LaTeX's old fashioned ways and allowed dynamic, interactive figures and data to be part of scholarly articles). We are one of the few projects that is truly rethinking scholarly writing. We also think that if a product is good enough, researchers and universities should be willing to pay for it. The problem is: what do we charge for? Since we are passionate about Open Science, Open Access and Open Data, we figured that we would charge for privacy so that on the one hand, we have a sustainable business (which is important and great!) and on the other, we are encouraging scientists to write in the open (our mission: equally great and important!). That is in a nutshell, why we are charging for privacy, i.e., "why you are paying for the swimsuit". We have been, from day one, open to suggestions. So I ask you: do you have ideas for alternative business models?

WELCOME TO LLAMAPUN! The Cornell preprint contains roughly a million scientific papers, making it a treasure trove for natural language processing (NLP) experiments. However, a big difference from mainstream NLP corpora is the presence of mathematical formulas, citations and other language modalities specific to scientific discourse. A second, and in practice just as significant challenge is that the majority of documents are authored in LaTeX, making them very irregular for naive automated mining. At the research group at Jacobs University we have invested a lot of work in trying to regularize the dataset and make it available for NLP research, which is a large topic in its own right. I wrote an entry-level blog post about that effort here. In this blog post, I want to briefly introduce the newest incarnation of the NLP library for scientific documents, backed up by a running example of word tokenization on an average preprint from the dataset.

G_{\mu\nu}+\Lambda T_{\mu\nu}={c^4}T_{\mu\nu}

INTRODUCTION Recently, there has been much interest in the construction of Lebesgue random variables. Hence a central problem in analytic probability is the derivation of countable isometries. It is well known that ∥γ∥=π. Recent developments in tropical measure theory have raised the question of whether λ is dominated by 𝔟. It would be interesting to apply the techniques of to linear, σ-isometric, ultra-admissible subgroups. We wish to extend the results of to trivially contra-admissible, _Eratosthenes primes_. It is well known that ${\Theta^{(f)}} ( } ) = \tanh \left(-U ( }} ) \right)$. The groundbreaking work of T. Pólya on Artinian, totally Peano, embedded probability spaces was a major advance. On the other hand, it is essential to consider that Θ may be holomorphic. In future work, we plan to address questions of connectedness as well as invertibility. We wish to extend the results of to covariant, quasi-discretely regular, freely separable domains. It is well known that $} \ne {}$. So we wish to extend the results of to totally bijective vector spaces. This reduces the results of to Beltrami’s theorem. This leaves open the question of associativity for the three-layer compound Bi₂Sr₂Ca₂Cu₃O10 + δ (Bi-2223). We conclude with a revisitation of the work of which can also be found at this URL: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1975CMaPh..43..199H.

San Francisco, CA – On view at Crown Point Press is an exhibition of etchings by scientists and mathematicians, September 4 - October 27, 2015. We came across this set of beautiful etchings on Artsy depicting mathematical equations. We decided to reproduce them on Authorea, using our equation editor and some LaTeX. Here’s the result.

Our goal is to reconstruct pre-SN mass-loss history using radio variability observations and constrain the dominant mass-loss mechanism during the last few hundred years of massive star evolution. We will draw from existing observations to re-design the strategy for future observing campaigns.

In a single page app, all of the decisions about what view/subview to render occurs on the client. This means that ideally the client would be able to authenticate the currently logged in user on transitions to sensitive pages and access its data without going back to the server. This means that special care needs to be made to protect our application from a malicious user interacting with the developer console present in all modern browsers. One possible security vulnerability is the escalation of a globally stored user user role. This would cause the hacker to view a part of the website that they were forbidden to.

So this happened. At a startup pitch event in Santa Monica last week, one investor asked us: how did you guys manage to build the codebase for Authorea since you're all physicists?The answer is that physicists write code too. Ha! And as a matter of fact, it is not only physicists. Also most computational biologists and medical researchers and virtually any scholar who works with data, in some way, will learn to code. Yes, even psychologists, social scientists, and digital humanists. 

Abstract goes here.

É stato dimostrato per la prima volta che é possibile determinare la presenza di intensi campi magnetici nelle regioni interne di stelle evolute. Questo puó essere fatto grazie all’asterosismologia, una disciplina simile alla sismologia ma applicata ai corpi celesti. L’asterosismologia sfrutta la presenza di onde che si propagano attraverso oggetti astronomici come le stelle, per determinarne le proprietá interne. Questo é analogo a un’ecografia, in cui si usano onde sonore per ottenere immagini di parti altrimenti invisibili del corpo umano. Le regioni esterne delle giganti rosse, stelle piú anziane del sole e con un raggio maggiore, sono caratterizzate da movimenti convettivi turbolenti che causano onde sonore. Questo é simile al rumore prodotto dall’acqua che bolle in una pentola. Queste onde si propagano all’interno della stella e a loro volta generano un altro tipo di onde (le onde di gravitá, da non confondersi con le onde gravitazionali). La forza responsabile per il moto oscillatorio delle onde di gravitá é la stessa responsabile per il galleggiamento dei corpi nell’acqua. Infatti le onde del mare sono un tipo particolare di onde di gravitá. In pratica quello che succede é che le onde sonore si propagano negli stati esterni della stella, che ’suona’ come un gigantesco strumento musicale. Nelle giganti rosse l’energia associata con queste onde sonore riesce a far oscillare anche gli strati piú profondi della stella, appunto sotto forma di onde di gravitá che si propagano fin nel nucleo stellare. Questa specie di interferenza tra i due tipi di onde richiede che un pó dell’energia presente nei moti oscillatori acustici che caratterizzano gli strati esterni, venga trasferita ai moti oscillatori che avvengono nel nucle della stella sotto forma di onde di gravitá. Se peró nel nucleo sono presenti dei campi magnetici, la situazione puó cambiare. Questo avviene se i campi magnetici sono abbastanza intensi da alterare la propagazione delle onde di gravitá. Il campo magnetico in questo caso puó essere immaginato come un grosso elastico che intrappola il gas stellare. Un’onda di gravitá, come un’onda del mare, prova a creare uno spostamento del fluido (in questo caso il gas) a cui peró si oppone la tensione dell’elastico. In questa situazione la propagazione delle onde viene alterata fino a indurre una specie di intrappolamento. Questo effetto é stato battezzato “Effetto serra magnetico”. Quando le onde di gravitá sono intrappolate dal campo magnetico, l’energia che avevano ottenuto a scapito delle oscillazioni acustiche degli strati esterni viene formalmente persa. Qusto si ripercuote in una diminuzione dell’ampiezza delle oscillazioni visibile alla superficie della stella. Questa diminuzione dell’ampiezza delle oscillazioni é stata in effetti osservata dal telescopio spaziale Kepler in un gruppo di giganti rosse. Kepler é in grado di misurare variazioni piccolissime della luminositá di una stella (una parte in un milione). Perció é possibile porre dei limiti o addirittura misurare il campo magnetico interno per alcune di queste stelle. Il risultato é sensazionale: Alcune di queste stelle posseggono campi magnetici intensissimi nei loro nuclei, milioni di volte piú intensi del campo associato a un tipico magnete da frigorifero. Questo rappresenta un importantissimo passo avanti nella comprensione delle stelle, poiché questi campi magnetici hanno un ruolo fondamentale per l’evoluzione stellare e le proprietá degli stadi finali della vita di una stella. Per esempio alcune delle esplosioni piú luminose nell’universo (i lampi di raggi gamma) potrebbero essere associate con la morte di stelle con massa 10 o piú volte maggiore del sole, che hanno mantenuto un forte campo magnetico nel loro nucleo.

OPEN SCIENCE “Open science commonly refers to efforts to make the output of PUBLICLY FUNDED RESEARCH MORE WIDELY ACCESSIBLE in digital format to the scientific community, the business sector, or society more generally” writes the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in its newly released study “Making Open Science a Reality”. In the digital age the role of tools like Authorea is to increase the efficiency of research as well of its diffusion. The benefits of open science identified by the OECD are multiple: 1. Reducing duplication costs in collecting, creating, transferring and reusing data and scientific material; allowing more research from the same data; and multiplying opportunities for domestic and global participation in the research process. 2. The greater scrutiny offered by open science allows a more accurate verification of research results. 3. Increased access to research results (in the forms of both publications and data) can foster spillovers not only to scientific systems but also innovation systems more broadly. (Firms and individuals may use and reuse scientific outputs to produce new products and services.) 4. Open science also allows the closer involvement and participation of citizens.

An article about Authorea was recently published in the online magazine Xconomy. The piece, titled Collaboration Platform Authorea Helps Ebola Virus Researchers, Others by João-Pierre S. Ruth discusses Authorea's vision to become a platform for open science collaboration.