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.

BROOKLYN, NY, July 29 2017 -- Authorea, the online document editor for researchers,  has partnered with the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the world's leading organization for astrophysicists and astronomers. With the partnership, researchers wishing to publish in AAS journals can now use Authorea to prepare their manuscripts and submit directly to any AAS journal for publication. The integration ensures documents automatically conform to AAS journal submission requirements, substantially reducing formatting time and effort.

Scholarly publishing is hard, really hard.  Researchers submit their manuscripts to journal after journal after journal in hopes of publishing their work in the most prestigious outlet. Because of how long and strenuous the publishing process is it's been compared to birth, a battlefield, and a lottery.  Individual student publishing at the graduate or undergraduate level is nearly unheard of--we'd like to change that.

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:

There is on average one planet orbiting every star in the Universe. Our Galaxy (the Milky Way) is an immense disk of gas and stars with a diameter of about 100 000 light years, hosting about 100 billion stars and, therefore, also about 100 billion planets. Take a deep breath. Now, it turns out the Milky Way is just one of 100 billion galaxies that populate our Universe, a colossal expanding stretch of spacetime with an age of 13.7 billion years. The math is trivial: There are about 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 = 10²² planets out there. This number is extremely large. Apparently larger than the number of grains of sand found in every beach and every desert on Earth. But how many of these planets host life? And in particular, how many planets host intelligent life we might be able to communicate with? RSVP and join us for our second official NEW YORK OPEN SCIENCE MEETUP. Check this blog post series if you wanna know more. This event is supported by Authorea.com, Minds.com and the Bitcoin Center NYC.

A common workflow in submitting scientific work to a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or conference, is to adhere to specially provided submission guidelines. To many this story is painfully familiar: your document must satisfy a long enumeration of requirements, including an official citation style, font face, margin and font sizes, single- or multi-column, frontmatter arrangements, ... The list goes on. The work on styling a finished document alone is known to take anywhere from a day to a week, irrespective of which tool you used - Word and LaTeX users alike had to sweat it out. What makes this situation a nightmare rather than an annoyance, however, is that more often than not a manuscript is rejected and needs to be resubmitted to a different venue, where this tedious procedure needs to be repeated from scratch. And that process can repeat for several iterations. As academics are urged to publish their work as quickly and often as possible, this type of friction accumulates.

INTRODUCTION We are happy to announce a partnership between Plotly and Authorea that gives you a free suite of powerful, collaborative tools for doing your analysis, graphing, coding, and publication. AUTHOREA AND PLOTLY, TOGETHER, CAN POWER YOUR RESEARCH COLLABORATION. WANT TO INSERT A PLOT.LY GRAPH IN YOUR OWN DOCUMENTS? FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS

Social media is generally discouraged in science today. A recent article, "I'm a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer" castigated scholars with active online social lives. Most advisors won't ask you to "tweet out our paper" or "write a blog post about our findings" and it's likely that you'd close Twitter or Reddit if your colleague or advisor walked by. Some conferences have taken it so far as to enforce a "no tweeting" policy. But social networking is here to stay and will likely become even more integrated into our lives and research.

In this week’s _Nature_, a special issue on the evolution of modern academic institutions, Arizona State University (ASU) President Michael Crow and his vision of the New American University are profiled. Appointed President in 2002, previously Executive Vice Provost at Columbia University, Crow began restructuring ASU. His goal: to shape it into A HUB OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND INNOVATION. 12 years into Crow’s tenure, ASU has expanded its campus, forming and constructing new research institutes like the Biodesign Institute, School of Earth and Space Exploration, and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. The University’s growth in funding and collaboration are also remarkable. From the _Nature_ piece: ASU’s funding numbers show that grant-givers find the cross-disciplinary approach attractive. From 2003 to 2012, the university’s FEDERALLY FINANCED RESEARCH PORTFOLIO GREW BY 162%, vastly outpacing the average increase seen at 15 similar public institutions. ... The number of funded projects with principal investigators in two or more departments rose by 75% between 2003 and 2014. While the article further notes that ASU’s publication rate has more than doubled, it asserts its scientific profile has hardly been raised. Citing largely unchanged proportions of publications in high-profile journals or with high numbers of citations, this analysis doesn’t account for some important factors. 1. Since ASU’s funding at present has more than doubled, one should expect an explosive BOOM in publications and citations over the next few years; 2. Collaborating, whether in the same institution or across the world is fraught with challenges, so pace may lag; 3. The research from ASU’s new institutes and far-reaching collaborations is inherently different (innovation is, by definition); like Crow said, “We don’t want to ask the same questions as other institutions,” so there aren’t yet large circles to cite these early works; 4. Building off the above point, it can take years for journal articles to accumulate even a portion of their lifetime citations (an argument against impact factor); Even without these caveats, ASU’s progression and THE ESSENCE OF CROW’S NEW AMERICAN UNIVERSITY MODEL PRESCIENTLY ANTICIPATED RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY. Observing ASU’s emphasis on cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship and innovation (E&I) through research, one notes similar trends at top-tier universities across the world. With job markets in flux, a rapidly changing economy, and an ever-increasing focus on science and technology, schools attract students and build connections to business through E&I hubs, an explicit goal of Crow’s vision for ASU. Rethinking and reimagining research and education at academic institutions is critical for universities and their students to remain competitive. Best of all, science and society will both benefit. Here’s to hoping the New American University expands beyond Phoenix, Arizona.

A recent article in Nature Communications is extremely informative. Like many good studies, it takes assumed fixtures or mainstays of a field (in this case isolated culturing in microbiology), flips them in some way, and arrives at novel observations and conclusions. Bacteria have usually been studied in single culture in rich media or in specific starvation conditions. These studies have contributed to understanding and characterizing their metabolism. However, they coexist in nature with other microorganisms and form consortia in which they interact to build an advanced society that drives key biogeochemical cycles. Briefly, the authors showed co-cultured bacteria (i.e. two different species from the same environment were grown together) formed physical connections with each other to allow ONE SPECIES TO HARNESS THE OTHER’S UNIQUE METABOLIC CHEMISTRY WHEN THE FORMER COULD NOT SURVIVE UNDER THE GIVEN STARVATION CONDITIONS. In turn, the donor species growth was elevated compared to isolation due to accessing it’s partners’ own metabolites. The researchers got some great pictures.

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN Science is going through a rapid phase of transformation. Two important trends are emerging: 1. Research is becoming more complex, requiring larger collaborations and bigger experiments. 2. Science and technology increasingly affect modern society. The first trend is easy to understand. Let’s think of the cumulative knowledge of humankind as a sphere. Scientists work at the surface and try to “push the boundary”. Discovery increases the volume of knowledge. As the sphere’s volume grows, so does its surface area. Therefore an ever increasing number of researchers is required to tessellate the expanding cutting-edge of science. Moreover, contrary to a few hundred years ago when the sphere of knowledge was so small that a single polymath could master large chunks of it, nowadays no human can understand the details of more than a few research topics. To capture the bigger picture and understand very complex research questions, collaborative efforts combining together a number of highly specific expertises are required.

Friday June 26, 2016. Today is a great day for human rights. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage. This decision reflects a shift in American public opinion: according to recent polls, 60% of Americans now support same-sex marriage. As a company devoted to promoting openness and collaboration, Authorea feels strongly this is an important step in the right direction. Obviously, sharing the ups and downs of life with another person is an immensely more important and complex task than writing a collaborative paper. Yet if we can draw a parallel, we might say that a useful measure of the progress of a society, and humankind in general, is its ability to share and care openly, together. That’s the way to unlock society’s true potential, and foster creativity and love. Happy writing. Happy loving. Authorea

Tens of thousands of innovators met in Austin, Texas last week to discuss emerging tech, science, and innovation. It was the Interactive portion of South by Southwest (SxSW). Authorea was there. Among many great events, the MIT Media Lab presented “SOLVE”, an initiative set to bring together the most gifted researchers and innovators to identify and tackle challenges where new thinking and emerging technologies have the potential to make the world a better place. SOLVE identified four main themes: Learn, Cure, Fuel, Make.

What is the main takeaway from your current research and why is it important?

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).

Last June, a dedicated global team of Ebola researchers began an ambitious project to track the virus using large-scale genome sequencing. Their research, published June 18 in _Cell_, reveals critical information about how the virus traveled and spread over seven months of the recent Ebola outbreak. The team, which included researchers from over a dozen institutions, made a conscious decision to pursue Open Science practices for this project. One choice they made was to write their paper on Authorea, a new science editing and publishing website. The full working version of the paper is now available to the public on Authorea. By using the “History” feature, readers can get a behind-the-scenes look at how the research came together, including every edit and change from the writing process. “When we were kicking off the study, we discussed how much we would open up what we’re doing,” said co-lead author Danny Park. “Our team comes out of the Human Genome Project, so culturally we come from the open science ’put everything out there’ background. And especially in this kind of emergency situation there’s a moral imperative” to publish the data openly and quickly, he said. The team chose Authorea in order to make the writing process transparent. Authorea’s History feature allows the public to view every change made during the writing process. Because key technical sentences were revised and words chosen carefully over time, the evolution of the document can be educational, said Dr. Park. Authorea was just one of many tools used by the research team to publish their work as quickly and openly as possible. The team: - Published their raw genome data to the GenBank database and Virological.org online forum as soon as it was collected, so that other research teams could use and discuss the data immediately - Released demographic and clinical metadata on a special website to enable other researchers to spot important trends - Set up a new website to gather and visualize data from multiple research groups - Published a Comment in Nature strongly advocating open sharing of data during this and future outbreaks - Chose Authorea as a platform to write and edit their draft manuscript, allowing readers to view the writing process with full transparency - Published their article as fully Open Access in _Cell_ “One of the most rewarding aspects of working in this outbreak response is the connections we have made with so many extraordinary individuals through open data sharing”, said senior author Pardis Sabeti. The goal of Open Science principles is to produce stronger, more reproducible, transparent scientific results as quickly as possible. It’s a virtuous circle: openness begets collaboration begets more openness. And in a serious outbreak like the recent Ebola epidemic, more open research can quite literally save lives. ABOUT AUTHOREA: Authorea is an online word processor that makes research writing and publishing faster and easier. Created by scientists, for scientists, Authorea encourages and supports Open Science, transparency, and collaboration. With over 41000 users and a weekly growth rate that has doubled in the past nine months, Authorea is currently the fastest-growing science publishing platform in the world. OTHER RESOURCES _AUTHOREA CONTACTS_ - Alberto Pepe, co-founder and CEO, Authorea: alberto@authorea.com, +1 (310) 600-3929 - Jace Harker, Growth and Community: jace@authorea.com, +1 585-737-6459 - Tanya Anderson, Outreach: tanya@authorea.com _KEY AUTHOR CONTACTS_ - Danny Park: dpark@broadinstitute.org

NEW YORK – Last June, a dedicated global team of Ebola researchers began an ambitious project to track the virus using large-scale genome sequencing. Their research, which was written on the research platform Authorea and published June 18 in the journal Cell , reveals critical information about how the virus traveled and mutated over seven months of the recent Ebola outbreak. Today Authorea is pleased to announce that the working draft, data, workflows, and full edit history of the paper are available to the public for free on Authorea. This is the first time that such complete details have ever been released for a scientific paper. This release provides unprecedented transparency and detail, empowering students and researchers to review every change and edit to every word during the writing of this landmark research paper, using Authorea’s “History” feature. “When we planned this study, our team decided to make our work as open and transparent as possible, and writing the paper on Authorea is part of that,” said co-lead author Daniel Park. “We felt a moral imperative to put everything out there, especially in this kind of emergency situation.” “Authorea was founded to make researchers’ day-to-day tasks easier,” says Authorea co-founder and Harvard Research Associate Alberto Pepe. “We realized we were wasting time emailing around documents and data. So we built a website where everyone could write and edit in the same place.” But Authorea also supports a bigger goal: making science more open. The platform is free to use for open research. “We encourage scientists to publish their entire research process: writing, data, and discussion,” said Dr. Pepe. “The default stance is often to be closed, and we encourage more openness and transparency.” Researchers in life sciences and other fields often withhold their raw data for months before and even after publishing, according to recent surveys. This practice has questionable utility, as it slows the pace of research, makes it less reproducible, and erodes public trust in science. “Open access saves lives,” said Professor Peter Suber from the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and the Harvard Open Access Project, which were not involved with the Cell Ebola study. “Research saves lives, and when access is unaffordable or delayed, the access barriers put lives at risk. This is especially true in a crisis like Ebola where time is of the essence.”

Pellentesque tincidunt lobortis orci non venenatis. Cras in justo luctus, pulvinar augue id, suscipit diam. Morbi aliquet fringilla nibh, vel pellentesque dui venenatis eget. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec ultricies ultrices magna gravida porta.