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\begin{document}

\title{Alberto Pepe on Authorea's Business Model (AMA)}


 \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 on the topic of~\textbf{Authorea's business
model}.~\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~\href{https://www.authorea.com/users/96042/articles/130316/_show_article}{general
AMA excerpts here}~or specific discussions on the topic
of~\href{https://www.authorea.com/users/96042/articles/130306/_show_article}{quality
control in
publishing}~or~\href{https://www.authorea.com/users/96042/articles/130438/_show_article}{metrics/ranking/impact}.\\\selectlanguage{english}
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\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/hipstie}{hipstie}\\

\section*{}\label{auto-label-section-416295}

How can you claim to be in support of open science/open scholarship when
authorea is closed source and a commercial application?\\

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

Co-Founder \textbar{} Authorea\\

hi Hipstie- I am glad you ask the question and I am sorry I did not get
to answer this yesterday. I see you make two separate points, namely:
how can you claim that Authorea supports Open Science if it is (1) not
Open Source, and (2) a commercial application? I'll answer the two
points separately.\\

(1) First off,~\textbf{Open Source and Open Science are not the same
thing}. I understand that they are related, but I would need a bit more
convincing as to why the only way to support Open Science is via tools
that are Open Source. I know a number tools, companies and initiatives
that are not ``Open'' but that have nevertheless made a contribution to
Openness. Is that a bad thing? One example which comes to mind is Github
which is NOT Open Source, but it has served as a catalyst for Open
Source in the last decade. I am not sure what is Github's decision
behind being closed source, but I will tell you why Authorea is
(currently) closed source: as much as we strive for openness in as many
departments as possible, and we remain fully committed to opening up
access to scientific research, we need to be sustainable as a project.
Which brings me to the second point.\\

(2) When I was in academia, I was myself under the impression that
commercial applications were detrimental to openness. All my academic
work has mostly been funded by research grants (NASA and NSF). Most
academic projects I created and worked on, however, ended when the
research grant was over.~\textbf{The advantage of building a commercial
application which has an underlying business model (that works) is that
the chance to create a sustainable, long term, more impactful project is
higher}. Authorea is a commercial application not because we are aiming
to make huge profits, but because we believe that it is great to make a
product that is so good that people and institutions will pay for it (to
create long term sustainability) and with a strong social mission that
can truly change an industry in dire need of change (academic
publishing).\\

I understand that being a commercial application does not mean that we
need to be closed source. There are some great examples of commercial
Open Source projects. We have decided to experiment with our current
model, at least for now. If you take a look
at~\href{https://www.authorea.com/users/3/articles/121541/_show_article?access_token=dzQ9c9RryYNSOa3t5WvE5Q}{our
open product roadmap}, you will notice that we are actually open
sourcing a fundamental part of Authorea very soon: the document
exporter. We are doing it because a lot of power users felt that the way
the export process works today is too much of a ``black box''. Plus,
they would love to contribute themselves to new export styles. It is a
no brainer and we are now open sourcing the exporter. Open sourcing the
entire platform is a possibility in the future. We need to determine if
we would still have a business if Authorea was fully open source.
Installing Authorea on a dedicated server for an experienced programmer
takes about 2 hours and if we had to fully open source the code, there
is a chance our business model would fail.\\

I hope that regardless of the availability of Authorea's codebase, we
will be able to encourage scientists and scholars to publish in a
different, more open and transparent way.\\
\end{quote}

\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/pink_ego_box}{pink\_ego\_box}\\

\begin{enumerate}
\tightlist
\item
  How would you monetize your alternative system? Elsevier and cie are
  extremely profitable because of the ridiculous subscriptions that
  universities and research centers pay for. But even free alternatives
  like PLOS had to be monetized to pay for servers, editing, and website
  management. They chose to do so by making researchers pay to publish.
  Would your system do the same?\\
\item
  How would you measure the impact of a ``paper'' (or whatever that
  non-static publication would be called) without any ranking system?
  Indexes are questionable because of how they only rely on citations to
  measure impact, but they serve a purpose and a need and cannot be
  removed without alternatives.\\
\end{enumerate}

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

Co-Founder \textbar{} Authorea\\

\begin{enumerate}
\tightlist
\item
  Our business model is a Freemium model whereby Authorea is free to use
  as long as you produce public content. You can write as many documents
  as you like on Authorea for free as long as you keep them ``open''. If
  you want to create private documents, you pay for private hosting. By
  using this model, we are encouraging authors to do ``open research''.
  Please note that Authorea does not have copyright on the content. All
  content produced is the ownership of authors. An author can delete,
  download, modify content at any point in time. So, in that sense, we
  are very different from traditional publishers (including PLOS, which
  is basically a traditional publisher). For the time being, we plan to
  keep charging scholarly authors, who pay because they are using a
  collaborative tool writing tool built exactly for them. We are getting
  increasing interest from institutions, departments, research labs who
  want to buy group licenses.\\[2\baselineskip]
\item
  As I said in a couple of other answers, I am not advocating for ``no
  ranking system''. However, scholars' contributions should be assessed
  across more components than simply number of citations. I suggest, in
  another answer, ``number of forks'' as a way to assess the impact of a
  scholar in ``giving birth'' to new research results. In other words,
  if a piece of code you wrote in, say, a genomics paper, is readapted
  by astronomers to bring about an amazing new discovery in, say,
  exoplanetary science, we should be able to reward you, and visualize
  the provenance.\\
\end{enumerate}
\end{quote}

\par\null

\href{https://www.reddit.com/user/vilnius2013}{vilnius2013}\\

PhD \textbar{} Microbiology~\\

\section*{}\label{auto-label-section-555216}

Napster and other file sharing services helped revolutionize the music
industry, which gave birth to iTunes (and 99-cent songs). Do you think
that your organization (and Sci-Hub) will do something similar to the
scientific publishing industry?\\

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

Co-Founder \textbar{} Authorea\\

Hi Vilnius2013. I am fascinated by the rise in popularity of Sci-Hub
and, in a way, I support it because it is bringing scholarly and
scientific knowledge to people that would not otherwise access to it. At
the same time,~\textbf{I think that it is absolutely inconceivable that
in year 2016 we need to resort to the dark web and illegal mechanisms to
disseminate scholarly content which should inherently be public, open,
and free}. What is even more irritating is that we have a solution
already, today, to freely and publicly disseminate scholarly knowledge.
The solution is called~\textbf{preprints}. Astronomers and physicists
have been doing it since before the web and net existed (libraries would
print out new unpublished manuscripts and they would send them around by
mail to partner libraries). As I said in another answer, a pre-print is
the version immediately prior to what is published in a journal (and
post-print immediately after). The pre-print version of an article is
ownership of the author and can be deposited in a repository (or if an
article is written in Authorea it is already there). So, my question is:
why exchange publisher-formatted (illegal) PDFs on a peer to peer
network when we can exchange those same articles, in html format, and
legally?\\
\end{quote}

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