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\begin{document}

\title{I'm Alberto Pepe, founder of Authorea. Ask Me Anything.\\}


 \author{The Authorea Team}


\date{}

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On September 15th, 2016 Authorea CEO and Cofounder, Alberto Pepe,
encouraged the Reddit science community to ask him anything. Below are a
few excerpts from the
AMA.~\href{https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/52vtf7/im_alberto_pepe_the_guy_challenging_elsevier_im/?st=itn51yxd\&sh=782b8bb5}{Click
here for the full thread}.\\

Read AMA discussions on the topic
of~\href{https://www.authorea.com/users/96042/articles/130306/_show_article}{quality
control in
publishing},~\href{https://www.authorea.com/users/96042/articles/130438/_show_article}{metrics/ranking/impact},
or~\href{https://www.authorea.com/users/96042/articles/130437/_show_article}{Authorea's
business model}.\\\selectlanguage{english}
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\section*{\texorpdfstring{Q. How does your platform compare
to~\url{https://arxiv.org/}?}{Q. How does your platform compare to~https://arxiv.org/?}}\label{auto-label-section-959596}

Asked by~\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/slcotttt}{slcotttt}\\

\section*{A.}\label{auto-label-section-600516}

\begin{quote}
There are some similarities and some differences between Authorea and
arXiv. They are both content repositories for scholarly articles with a
focus on preprints. A pre-print is the version immediately prior to what
is published in a journal and it is owned by the author, not the
publisher. I will mention some differences between the two platforms:\\

\begin{enumerate}
\tightlist
\item
  \textbf{PDF vs HTML}. The most important difference is the format of
  the papers. Authorea believes in the ``paper'' of the future, a
  data-driven, interactive, web-native document. As such, content on
  Authorea is first and foremost HTML. You can export a PDF, Word,
  LaTeX, ZIP version of any article. ArXiv is a collection of
  PDFs.\\[3\baselineskip]
\item
  \textbf{Collaborative editing}. The arXiv is not a content creation
  platform. Authorea is. It allows many authors to write papers
  together.\\[3\baselineskip]
\item
  \textbf{Data support}. The arXiv had a short data pilot two years ago
  in which they invited users to deposit data with their articles. It
  was not successful. I believe that was the case because there was no
  incentive. The data deposited was not ``actionable'' in any way.
  Authorea supports data deposit~\textbf{inside}~a paper and currently
  makes sense of IPython (Jupyter) Notebooks and a number of
  Javascript-based visualization packages (d3.js, flotcharts, bokeh,
  plotly, etc).\\[3\baselineskip]
\item
  \textbf{Altmetrics}. The arXiv has refused over time to reveal
  alternative metrics, such as number of downloads as they think that
  they could be used to assess authors' rank and that they are subject
  to gaming. Authorea has the opposite mindset in this regard. We will
  publish, to reflect our mission to be transparent and open, all the
  information we store about documents.\\
\end{enumerate}
\end{quote}

\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/lucaxx85}{lucaxx85}\\

PhD \textbar{} Medical Imaging \textbar{} Nuclear Medicine\\

Hi Alberto.\\

\section*{}\label{auto-label-section-800315}

I've seen a couple of proposal like yours and I'm always left with a
question. Currently there are just too many papers published, the only
way to even know what's going on it's to use automatic algorithms that
decide for you what titles might be relevant for you (i.e.: the Google
thingy). Aren't proposals to make publishing much faster and reviewed
afterwards by readers only going to make things much, much
worse?\\[2\baselineskip]

\begin{quote}
\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/Alberto_Pepe}{Alberto\_Pepe}\\

Co-Founder \textbar{} Authorea\\

The ever-increasing scale and size of knowledge output is something we
need to deal with no matter what, I think. I believe it goes beyond
scientific publishing - the same has happened to all domains of
knowledge creation, including fiction (self-publishing eBooks), film,
photo, and audio (eg. Youtube), news (social media as blogs and
twitter). As the barriers of entry to publishing become ever lower, we
have to find new ways of organizing and recognizing valuable
information.\\

It is no accident that the early players who managed to organize the
free dissemination of information on planetary scale are now some of the
highest valued companies in the world. As science becomes more
data-driven and computational in nature, scientific work, and hence
literature, methods and datasets (as well as collaborations!) will keep
increasing both in frequency and size.\\

In my opinion, we shouldn't fear this acceleration of the process of
human discovery, and we shouldn't see it as an overwhelming development.
Rather, we should be humbled by the progress we are able to make and
become ever better at summarizing and organizing the growing size of the
body of scientific knowledge. There are entire disciplines dedicated to
studying these challenges - Knowledge Management, Information Theory and
Retrieval, Data Science, Information Seeking Behavior, and so on (the
field of Information Science, broadly). A promising new ecosystem of
tools and initiatives is emerging, with the aim to build information
solutions for scientific management. I am happy that Authorea is part of
that ecosystem.\\
\end{quote}

\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/nate}{nate}\\

PhD \textbar{} Organic Chemistry\\

\section*{}\label{section}

What motivated you to undertake this, was there a particular event
involved?\\

What sort of response have you received from elder academics who already
struggle with digital formats?\\

\par\null



\begin{quote}
\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/Alberto_Pepe}{}\href{https://www.authorea.com/users/3}{Alberto\_Pepe}\\

Co-Founder \textbar{} Authorea\\

Hey Nate- thanks for the question. I hope your Ph.D. is going well!
Authorea was born out of frustration for the way science is written,
disseminated and published. I met my co-founder, also a physicist while
I was working at CERN. We were both writing research papers and hating
the process. To be precise, we were loving doing research (collecting
and crunching data, writing code, etc) but the moment we had to start
writing a paper we realized that there was no tool out there that
enabled collaborative writing in a way that made sense to us. While
having dinner with Nate (years after CERN) in a cool Neapolitan pizza
joint, I shared my idea and frustration with Nate and he said ``Damn!
Why isn't there a Github for scientific papers?''. That was roughly the
beginning of Authorea. It was also a good pizza.\\

It is no secret that Authorea is more appealing to younger scholars: 25
to 45 years old. (I am hoping 45 is considered ``young''). We have elder
academics using Authorea too and they tend to fall in two categories: 1)
``cool'' professors and researchers who are always at the forefront of
technology, 2) scholars who are curious to know what the younger
generation of scientists are doing. Our platform is quite simple to use
and it is getting even better (very very soon, it is going to be really
awesome). We are here to facilitate writing needs of all researchers.
Even if the learning curve is steeper for some, we're happy to take the
time to help anyone who is willing to give us a try.\\
\end{quote}

\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/lasserith}{lasserith}\\

Grad Student\textbar{}Molecular Engineering\\

\section*{}\label{auto-label-section-971112}

With no restrictions on submissions you'll inevitably have more
submissions. However research is only valuable if it's shared and read.
This requires other scientists to find and to read it.\\

How do you intend researchers to find relevant papers to read when you
currently have no keywords and no search functionality? There is also no
doi assigning process currently in place\\

\begin{quote}
{Alberto\_Pepe}\\

Co-Founder \textbar{} Authorea\\

Hi there lasserith,\\

Your criticism is very well taken. We are trying to solve one problem at
a time. Right now, we are focused on making collaborative writing as
seamless as possible and then becoming a solid preprint repository where
(data-driven, interactive) papers are hosted, discovered and read. We
are extremely concentrated with the former
-~\href{https://www.authorea.com/users/3/articles/121541/_show_article?access_token=dzQ9c9RryYNSOa3t5WvE5Q}{as
you can see in our open product roadmap}~- but we do have plans to push
on the latter in the new year. Specifically, we will soon allow users to
tag their articles with keywords (and we will use that information to
build ``expertise profiles'' for users). Moreover, we will implement our
(very limited) {[}Browse Articles page{]}() with a powerful search
engine system so that papers can actually be searched and found.
Finally, we will be making our first step in the direction of publishing
by allowing users to mint DOIs for their articles (this is in the
product roadmap too). This is a natural move as a lot of content written
on Authorea (essays, technical reports, blogs, gray literature) is not
meant for publication but authors have requested that they need a way to
cite it and refer to it.\\[2\baselineskip]
\end{quote}

\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/masungura}{masungura}\\

Hi Alberto! I'm in the social sciences (anthropology to be precise) and
my husband (a software developer) can't, for the life of him, why
academics don't throw off the yoke and create something like github to
solve the issue of reliability and trustworthiness in publishing. I see
this as really laudable, but it does seem more difficult for the social
sciences or the humanities.\\

\section*{}\label{auto-label-section-488942}

How do you see this platform engaging with the social sciences or other
qualitative research, where data might be extensive notes from
ethnographic observations, interview transcriptions, drawings, collected
media, etc., possibly not in a well-known language, and researchers
exercise a greater degree of interpretive freedom while still having to
maintain a rigorous standard of quality?\\

\begin{quote}
{Alberto\_Pepe}\\

Co-Founder \textbar{} Authorea\\

Hi masungura, Authorea is currently used by researchers in the ``hard
sciences'' but more and more also by social scientists, psychologists
and other scholars who do not conduct data-driven research. Some of the
features of Authorea (e.g. easy citation) are compelling to scholars of
all flavors. I think that if the github layer is ``hidden'' enough so
that the platform is not overly technical, we can make version control
work well for academia, as a whole.\\
\end{quote}

\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/m263}{m263}~\\

Hi Alberto. Fantastic work on Authorea, looks like a really promising
platform for a good cause.\\

I'm a doctoral student in social science co-authoring articles with
other social scientists. I love LaTeX and markdown and plain text and
git, but I find that I am totally alone in a department using and
requiring MS Word and possibly Google Docs, if they're
adventurous.\\[2\baselineskip]

\section*{}\label{auto-label-section-641012}

How can we wean non-natural science people off the MS Office addiction
in which there's so much sunk costs and given that those tools are
convenient for them at the moment even though open science is more
sustainable in the long run?\\

\begin{quote}
{Alberto\_Pepe}\\

Co-Founder \textbar{} Authorea\\

Hi m263, sorry for the late reply. Just minutes ago, I wrote: ``Authorea
is currently used by researchers in the ''hard sciences" but more and
more also by social scientists, psychologists and other scholars who do
not conduct data-driven research. Some of the features of Authorea (e.g.
easy citation) are compelling to scholars of all flavors. I think that
if the github layer is ``hidden'' enough so that the platform is not
overly technical, we can make version control work well for academia, as
a whole." We are working on a major revamp of the editor to make it look
and feel like Google Docs. Sign up for the private beta if you are
interested in checking it
out!~\url{https://www.authorea.com/users/8850/articles/128404/\_show\_article}\\
\end{quote}

\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/shiruken}{shiruken}\\

Grad Student \textbar{} Biomedical Engineering \textbar{}
Neurophotonics\\

\section*{}\label{auto-label-section-696046}

Do you envision a future where researchers are expected to publicly
catalogue the entire experimental process prior to writing and
submitting an article for peer review? Is it realistic to expect that
the peer-reviewers will go through the process of reviewing raw data and
verifying that everything was designed and calculated correctly? Do you
plan to integrate with services such as the~\href{https://osf.io/}{Open
Science Framework}~to allow for deeper integration of raw data into
publications?\\

\begin{quote}
{}\href{https://www.authorea.com/users/3}{Alberto\_Pepe}\\

Co-Founder \textbar{} Authorea\\

Good questions, Shiruken. I think researchers should include in their
publications the data and code necessary to replicate the results of
their research. The process of peer-reviewing can then be easily
distributed, because other scholars trying to replicate the research
(e.g. building on the results) would be able to verify if there are
problems with the underlying science or not. We are friends with the
Open Science Framework and we are currently discussing with them an
integration between Authorea and OSF. By the way, we had Brian Nosek
over at Authorea a few months ago
and~\href{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_X8lQZtUlQ}{he gave a great
talk on Open Science}!\\
\end{quote}

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