WORDS ARE IMPORTANT. THEY CONVEY OUR THOUGHTS, OUR IDEAS, OUR INTUITIONS. PASSION, LOVE, DISCOVERY, THEY ALL MATERIALIZE FROM WORDS EMERGING FROM THE INNER WORKINGS OF OUR MINDS. AND WHEN WE WRITE, WHEN WE FILL WITH WORDS THE EMPTY CANVAS IN FRONT OF US, SOMETIMES THOSE INTUITIONS, THOSE FEELINGS, THOSE BEAUTIFUL BUNDLES OF THOUGHTS, THEY SUDDENLY BECOME CLEARER. ALL OF THE SUDDEN WE REALLY UNDERSTAND. THE WRITERS. THE READERS. THE LOVERS. TO LOVE, PASSION, DISCOVERY. TO WORDS. Happy Writing, - Matteo and The Authorea Team

The KITP invites collaborating researchers who were participants of selected recent programs to apply to visit, in order to pursue work initiated during their prior KITP visits. The goal is to enhance those collaborative efforts initiated at a KITP program that would clearly benefit from a brief, focused return to the KITP. Groups of 2-6 members with established collaborations arising from the following programs may apply to visit for 1 or 2 weeks during the period October 26-December 18, 2015: - Magnetism, Bad Metals and Superconductivity: Iron Pnictides and Beyond - Galactic Archaeology and Precision Stellar Astrophysics - Dynamics and Evolution of Earth-like Planets - Quantum Gravity Foundations: UV to IR Proposals should be short, consisting of 1-2 pages justifying the group of researchers who will participate, explaining the science and objectives that the group will pursue during the visit, and explicitly stating the preferred dates when the group can come. Visits must be for one or two complete weeks, with all applicants in residence at the same time. Applying to the program consists of two steps: 1. One collaborator must submit the group’s proposal at Form. 2. Each member of the proposed group must also fill out a brief online application at Activities. All application materials must be received by July 5, 2015. Invitations will be issued by July 17, 2015. For those invited to participate, KITP will reserve and directly pay for housing at West Cottages and provide office space in Kohn Hall during the visits. Visitors will be fully responsible for travel, meals and any other expenses.

In the digital age, how are people supposed to know what you’re doing if you don’t share it with them? We are moving into a research age that is all about breaking down barriers, by embracing the reason why the Web was created - for sharing knowledge. We are recognising as a collective that collaboration and communities are more powerful than individuals and isolation. The parallels are everywhere, in the open source and open education movements, for example. For me as a researcher, open science has always been a complex beast to comprehend as a process. But as a vision, it was easy, based on the underlying principles of freedom and sharing. Social media was one way of helping to push forward towards that vision, by reshaping how I both think and operate as a researcher. And you know what? It’s liberating. Knowing there is a world beyond your desk or lab bench, where people are genuinely interested in your work, and want to interact with you and help build you up as a researcher and a person. You feel connected to like-minded spirits, and are empowered by the presence of others also trying to break down ivory towers and walls and make research something for everyone. I would not be where I am now without social media. There is an enormous, welcoming, and energetic community of researchers out there who every single day are a support mechanism for unleashing your potential as a researcher. For example, the OpenCon community is something I would not be part of without dabbling in social media, and through it learning about the open access trade. OpenCon was the first time as an academic I felt truly passionate about, well, anything - it was like an inferno was lit inside me, and I felt this burning desire to commit to this vision for an ’Open World’ as much as possible, and to help others see it too. Two years down the line, I spend every day now supporting the principles of open through various aspects of the scholarly communication process. Social media plays a huge role in this, as part of a massive scale structural re-think towards how we treat and regard knowledge as a society. Social platforms help us to re-shape cultural attitudes towards knowledge generation, and the sharing of that knowledge for the betterment of everyone. Being open about my own research and sharing my work on social media as it was still ongoing has led to many successful collaborations. I have been fortunate to be included now on three research publications, which I would not otherwise have been involved in if other researchers involved hadn’t seen that I was working on similar things by sharing them on social media. In an academic climate where papers are still the trading currency, this collaboration has been invaluable in improving my profile as a researcher, but also in opening up a whole new channel of learning that otherwise would have been closed to me. Often with social media, it’s not obvious what opportunities will present themselves, but you sure as hell won’t find out unless you actually give it a shot and make a commitment. As well as for academic networking, social media can be a powerful platform for public engagement. It is imperative that scientists bond more with wider society to help foster a greater understanding of the world around us. Indeed, what’s the point in doing research after all if no-one is going to learn from it? In spite of this, using social platforms in this manner is still often viewed as superlative to the ‘real work’ of researchers. So, research. Often when people ask me about Twitter or blogging, they say “Oh, that must be good for your CV”, or something similar. Which kind of misses the point entirely - we do these things because of a deep belief that science belongs to everyone, not to parade ourselves around in public. It needs to be seen that research and broader dissemination of research are not disparate, opposite, or disconnected. Research has not been complete until it has been communicated in the best possible way to the maximal audience possible. Realisation of this is the first major step towards embedding a wider sense of ‘science for society’ in our research culture, and being part of reaching a collective vision that science belongs to everyone and not just the priveleged few.

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This Authorea document template can be used to prepare documents according to a desired citation style and authoring guidelines. Abstracts are not always required, but most academic papers have one and writers should know how to produce a useful abstract. An abstract should be a very short, clear and concise summation of the entire paper.An abstract should provide enough of a preview that a typical reader will know whether or not they wish to read the paper. It should reveal both the purpose and conclusions of the paper.IntroductionThe format of this template follows a typical journal publication with an introduction, results and conclusion. Examples of an equation, list and citation are also included. The purpose of the introductionMost academic introductions follow an ‘inverted pyramid’ structure: they start broad and narrow down to a specific thesis or research question. The introduction should reveal:some broad knowledge of the overall topicreferences to related and prior work in the field of investigationsuccinct overview of the major point of the paperResultsThis section is only included in papers that rely on primary research. This section catalogues the results of the experiment. The results should be presented in a clear and unbiased way. Most results sections will contain links and citations, e.g., \cite{Feynman_1986}, and equations, e.g. \(e^{i\pi}+1=0\).ConclusionThe conclusion should reinforce the major claims or interpretation in a way that is not mere summary. The writer should try to indicate the significance of the major claim/interpretation beyond the scope of the paper but within the parameters of the field. The writer might also present complications the study illustrates or suggest further research the study indicates is necessary.

No more than approx. 500 words (or 3000 characters).Headings in structured abstracts should be bold and followed by a period. Each heading should begin a new paragraph. For example:

When I first read the question for this essay competition, I immediately associated the word 'social' with the word 'personal', i.e. outside of work. Social media is becoming an important source of primary information about the lives of ordinary people like you and me. But I am wary.

This is an example article showing Authorea’s new IPYTHON INTEGRATION features. Take a look at the figures in this paper. When you hover on a figure, a “LAUNCH IPYTHON” button should appear. Click it and you’ll be spinning a virtual machine which takes all analysis (iPython notebooks, makefiles, etc) and data behind that plot and runs it for you to play with. Enjoy!

CERN's 2008 Large Hadron Collider is not just the world's largest and most powerful particle collider but also the largest single machine and most complex experimental facility. Here, physicists are able to test fundamental physics theories by smashing particles with extremely high energies. On 8 October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider."

I can write in bold or italic. This is a rich text editor.

Graduate school is notoriously lonely- so I’m on Tinder. And so is the rest of my lab. I’ve seen your profiles, guys! For those unfamiliar, Tinder is a dating app that allows you to very simply browse mates by viewing pictures. You swipe left if you don’t like what you see or right if you do. It’s a social networking site in that it allows you to sort through other people nearby and interact with only those that also swiped right on you. All people, not just grad students apparently, get lonely so Tinder represents a relatively diverse cross section of the population. I’ve met people on Tinder with professions from house painter to software developer to professional clown (swipe left, swipe left!). Now as far as social media goes, it is generally well integrated into my professional life. My advisor is active on twitter, regularly posts on her blog, and encourages us to use online platforms for everything from notebooks to lab organization. We are a modern lab. But this social media communication that we typically practice, such as live tweeting conferences or posting on ResearchGate, ends up being almost exclusively scientist-to-scientist communication. While students should be sure to integrate this sort of communication into their work, most of the world is not populated by scientists. Most people are house painters, software developers, clowns, etc. and my time on Tinder has taught me how utterly incompetent we are at communicating our work with them. As a bioengineer with an emphasis on genetic manipulation, I tend to get a pretty formulaic response from new people. “Oh wow, bioengineering. Miss smarty pants over here.” There’s a certain level of pedantic shock and surprise when you’re young, blonde, female and a PhD student in STEM. This is usually followed by some joke, always pertaining to possible nefarious activities that I might be undertaking in the lab. “What kind of super virus are you cooking up?” “Resurrect any dinosaurs lately?” When I first started talking to people on dating apps about my career, I was shocked by how many assumed I was getting a PhD in Evil. Most people go into my field with the intention of curing cancer, not causing vast global plagues. But our portrayal of scientists in pop culture as generally a little whacked in the head, and superstitious fears of GMOs explain a lot of this. Many people have no picture of what a scientist, bioengineer, or other STEM professional looks like outside of the general stereotype of an old white man with crazy hair. We have done a terrible job showing non-STEM folks that we can be women, people of color, queer, etc. And we have failed in communicating the motives behind our work to them. Tinder has put me into contact with more diverse groups of people than any other social media platform. My list of Facebook friends and Twitter followers is full of scientists like me, but I swipe right on people from all walks of life. Over time, I’ve developed an elevator speech for my work that I can give to non-scientists. I’ve figured out ways to define complicated topics like horizontal gene transfer in metaphors that make sense to a broader audience, ie that bacteria swap genes like Pokemon cards. I’ve become able to talk about complex biological engineering with people who haven’t taken biology since the eighth grade. And these new skills from late night chats and many, many first dates, have improved my science communication skills vastly. I have translated them into speaking clearly with possible funding agencies, improving my K-12 outreach, and describing my work to broader media outlets. But I shouldn’t have had to learn this through Tinder. If we ever hope to see strong funding for science, public understanding, science-conscious policy making, and true diversity in science, we need to shift our communication style. We need to learn in the course of our studies how to communicate outside of our special little STEM club. There is a world of house painters, software developers, and clowns out there that is curious but hopelessly uninformed. We’re the experts and the onus is on us to be able to keep them in the loop by including them in our target audience for communication. We have the luxury of knowing how to find answers in databases, understand primary literature, and think critically about data. Joe from Tinder never learned this stuff. It’s our job to make sure that when we publish a paper, we blog about it in a way he can understand and that is still accurate. It’s on us to ensure that this makes it to media outlets that he uses. And it’s our job to make sure that when we match with him on Tinder, we know what to say.

This is a layman summary of “Local Radiation Hydrodynamic Simulations of Massive Star Envelopes at The Iron Opacity Peak” from Yan-Fei Jiang (姜燕飞), Matteo Cantiello , Lars Bildsten, Eliot Quataert and Omer Blaes. The full article can be downloaded from the arXiv. This layman summary is part of the Public Friendly Open Science initiative.

During the night of August 11th, a meteor shower called ’Perseids’ might put up a memorable show. After the moon sets, which occurs around 1:00 AM local time, it might be possible to see up to 200 ’shooting stars’ per hour. Below, what you need to know about this astronomical event. WHAT IS A SHOOTING STAR? Despite their name, shooting stars are actually small rocks (meteoroids) falling towards the Earth due to our planet’s gravitational attraction. As they move rapidly through the atmosphere, they reach very high temperatures due to friction with air particles. This makes them burn and become visible to the human eye. The trail they leave is called ’Meteor’. Due to their tiny size, they usually almost completely burn in a fraction of a second. In some very exceptional cases, large meteors can continue the hot descent and hit the ground. If they also survive the crash, they get promoted immediately to the ’meteorites’ class. Generally speaking a meteoroid producing a meteor needs to be at least as large as a marble to reach the Earth and eventually become a meteorite. Some Burning facts: - Average meteorite velocity: 30000 miles/hour (48000 km/h) - Max temperature: 3000 F (1650 C) - The Meteor Crater in Arizona was formed 50000 years ago by an object 160 feet (50 meters) across - ... yes, impacts like the one that produced the Meteor Crater are extremely rare

A NEW COLLABORATIVE TOOL COULD REVOLUTIONIZE SCIENTIFIC AUTHORSHIP. Originally published by Scientific American

Alberto Pepe is the co-founder of Authorea. He is also an Associate Research Scientist at HARVARD UNIVERSITY where he recently finished a Postdoctorate in Astrophysics. During his postdoctorate, Alberto was also a fellow of the BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET AND SOCIETY and the INSTITUTE FOR QUANTITATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE. Alberto is the author of 30 publications in the fields of Information Science, Data Science, Computational Social Science, and Astrophysics. He obtained his Ph.D. in Information Science from the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES with a dissertation on scientific collaboration networks which was awarded with the Best Dissertation Award by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Prior to starting his Ph.D., Alberto worked in the Information Technology Department of CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked on data repository software and also promoted Open Access among particle physicists. Alberto holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Astrophysics, both from UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON, U.K. Alberto was born and raised in the wine-making town of Manduria, in Puglia, Southern Italy. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @albertopepe

BackgroundJingjing Liang is Assistant Professor of Forest Ecology at West Virginia University. He is Coordinator of the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative (GFBI), an international, multi-stakeholder team of foresters and forest scientists supporting cutting-edge research and policy making in forest sciences and related areas.Jingjing is also the lead author of GFBI's first major scientific paper: Positive biodiversity-productivity relationship predominant in global forests \cite{Liang_2016}. The paper, which was written collaboratively in Authorea by a team of over eighty researchers, was published in the the Oct. 14, 2016 issue of Science.InterviewAuthorea: Congratulations on publishing in Science! How long has this paper been in the works?Jingjing Liang: We started the data compilation and analysis in October 2015, and completed the first draft in May, 2016. That being said, our data collection work started a few years ago.Authorea: Your team analyzed a forest inventory of more than 777,000 sample plots in 44 countries containing more than 30 million trees, making this one of the first attempts to gain a global perspective on the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem productivity. Can you contextualize this accomplishment for us?Jingjing Liang: Sure, forest inventory data are among the most expensive data to collect on this planet, because 1) it takes skilled and experienced foresters to do the work, and 2) the transportation and related logistics to and from the sites make an inventory trip very costly. According to my rough estimate, measuring 100 plots in remote areas cost $50,000 per year, so, the measurement of all the GFBI plots alone would cost US$400,000,000. GFBI plot data consist one of the largest ground-sourced data set in the world, and would be valuable in many applications from policy making to research support.Authorea: You argue that the worldwide productivity of forests decreases at an accelerating rate with the loss of biodiversity -- does this mean essentially that it's less costly to preserve biodiversity than it is not to?Jingjing Liang: Yes, also because we have shown in the article that conserving biodiversity can lead to potential forestry dividends that would far exceed the annual cost of effective biodiversity conservation worldwide.Authorea: What do you see for the future of biodiversity-productivity relationship (BPR) analyses?Jingjing Liang: BPR analyses would thrive in two fronts- big data and controlled experiments. The big data approach addresses the observed patterns in natural ecosystems, whereas the experiments addresses the mechanisms behind the foregoing patterns.Authorea: Your paper contained 84 authors in total. How did you coordinate the writing and work with such a large group? Were there advantages and disadvantages to such a collaboration that you faced?Jingjing Liang: It is very challenging and takes lots of patience and respect to others. It  is difficult to please everyone, or anyone in that matter, but science takes collaboration, and collaboration takes mutual respect, compromise, and even sacrifice.Authorea: Was there a key reason why you decided to write your article on Authorea?  What were some of the features you liked?Jingjing Liang: We needed a platform that facilitates manuscript development by a large group. Authorea proves to be the platform that we need. It is easy to register and easy to use. The only thing I would recommend is to set the default of "email each comment to everyone" option to "email none", for a large-group collaboration.For more information on the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative, please visit: http://www.gfbinitiative.org/research

“Honestly, I think you’ll like it!” said my then boyfriend (now husband), when trying to persuade me to join Twitter back in 2011. The baffled, confused expression on my face was followed by “why on Earth would I want to waste my time following celebrities? Who cares what Lady Gaga eats, drinks and wears? It’s not for me.” Famous last words. Like many academics, I was blind to the potential of social media. Yes, you can choose to use it to follow celebrities, TV programmes, amusing memes and your friends & family (nothing wrong with that, I do it too!). But, as an academic, you also stand to gain so much from it if you are willing to invest a little time. When I eventually took the plunge and joined Twitter I was coming into the second year of my PhD and quickly realising the importance of growing my academic network. Of course, I fostered relationships at conferences, but my research budget was tight and international travel limited. My strongest links were, naturally, developing with scientists, in my broad field, in the country I was working in. In the competitive world of academia, I was all too aware that if I wanted to progress my career I needed to expand my horizons. Twitter was a game changer.  Unbeknownst to me there was this invaluable, (quickly growing) online community of fellow scientists. All of a sudden, I was able to connect with researchers across the globe, regardless of geographical location and career stage. Not only that, they were having interesting and valuable conversations, which I was now privy to. I learnt about ground-breaking research and discovered a world of supportive PhD students who shared useful tips on how to survive the early days in the research world. I went from simply listening to conversations, to taking part in them and eventually sharing content which, to my surprise, people found interesting and useful. It took time, but I slowly carved out my small corner of the twittersphere. One where my opinion was sought and where I was known – I was successfully growing that all important network! But I didn’t approach social media exclusively with a ‘what’s in it for me’ attitude. Throughout my PhD, being a researcher, paid to do my work by public funds, I had a strong sense that it was important to give something back. Science forms the basis of so much of our daily lives, yet it goes unnoticed by so many. Social media became the platform where I (and many others) could reach out about my work, about the importance of science in general and about why it is important to communicate it.  Since that fateful conversation back in 2011, not only have I changed my tune about Twitter, I’ve built relationships that now form the basis of a number of working collaborations (past and present). My network of contacts far exceeds anything I might have been able to cultivate otherwise. I draw on these contacts often and sometimes I can even return the favour! On a very personal level, it is heartwarming that I now call some of my followers, friends.  Importantly, the time I invested in nurturing my social media presence and building my network has, and continues to, open many doors.  My work as a science communicator, particularly using social media platforms, slowly got noticed. Since, I have been invited to speak on panels about using social media as an academic, to join a blog network and I’ve been asked to deliver workshops to PhD students on how to use social media in a research context. Above all, had I not pursued science communication using social media and blogging, even when my supervisors weren’t supportive, I wouldn’t have landed my current job.  Things are changing, slowly, but there is (still) hostility towards those in academia who chose to devote, even a small fraction of their time, to outreach via social media (and other forms of outreach too).  Social media is not for all academics. I understand and respect that. Even if you only dabble in it, it requires you to dedicate time to it; time, which you might decide is better spent on other activities. That is ok.  Still, regardless of whether you choose to embrace it or not, social media is a powerful tool that researchers can use to reach out to others less familiar with their subject, as well as make their work open and accessible. It isn’t, or doesn’t have to be (like I once thought and many still do), about what Lady Gaga had for lunch. Just because it’s not your bag, doesn’t mean it is not worthy and valuable.

When you're reinventing the research article you will continually need to be reinventing yourself. That's what we've been doing over the last few months, reinventing one of our core features -- our editor.Today, we're happy to announce that we are inviting researchers to a private test of our new editor. We created a new editor because we listened to our users, and we're going to make it even better by listening to our users once again. If you're interested in joining our private beta please send us an email at [email protected]. We will be limiting our trial to 100 users and will be selecting researchers from a diverse set of backgrounds.We're very excited to share what we're working on with our users. Here's to a better research writing experience -- here's to the future.