from Hacker News

Authorea: Write research papers inside your browser

by synparb on 3/7/13, 1:18 AM with 70 comments

  • by ank286 on 3/7/13, 4:57 AM

    Landing page comment: "Write research papers, right inside your browser" As a researcher, I immediately ask "Why?" What is wrong with my Latek utils and fabulous MS Word that my research lab gave me for free. Then, where are some templates for the journals/conferences I could possible use with Authorea. You can reach far more people if you included templates from most journals/conferences. Then I can see this taking off.. Otherwise it is nothing but a fancy text-editor to me with Latek support and is trying to be like arXiv. As it is, arXiv has a lot of noisy publications.
  • by xaa on 3/7/13, 2:32 AM

    Something like this is sorely needed. Google Docs is the best compromise between simplicity and collaboration that my group has come up with, but of course it doesn't have reference support.

    It is very visually appealing and has good features. However, for me, it seems very sluggish and unresponsive.

  • by natejenkins on 3/7/13, 4:20 AM

    Our goal is to reinvent the article online.

    One thing that really needs to change is that figures need to come to life. While there are a few ways too accomplish this, one is by using javascript libraries such as d3.js to render dynamic images.

    As an example of things to come, have a look at: https://www.authorea.com/522

    Does not work in Firefox at the moment.

  • by krcz on 3/7/13, 12:01 PM

    That's a great idea and really good implementation. The only thing I'd miss from Google Docs are comments that are not part of a text (in Docs these are rendered on right side of document). You could implement it by come special syntax for comments, which wouldn't render when exported and on site, and in edit mode, it would show just a little icon. GUI option to click somewhere to add comment in this place would make it even easier. It allows further capabilities, like easy inline peer review.
  • by xur17 on 3/7/13, 4:46 AM

    Looks great! One quick comment - the links on the left hand side of an article should only take up enough space to fit the text for the links, so more space can be dedicated to the article.

    Ex: https://www.authorea.com/users/1/articles/483/_show_article

    Otherwise, it looks great - I'm going to be starting to write my thesis soon, and I plan to try this out.

  • by synparb on 3/7/13, 1:21 AM

    I'm curious how easy it's going to be to (1) download the git repo from the backend, and (2) format the articles to meet specific journal requirements for submission.
  • by skyahead on 3/7/13, 11:07 AM

    Latex is free! Authorea is NOT. This is the main problem I see.

    And the second problem, who will write papers in public before publication?

  • by rdw on 3/7/13, 2:21 AM

    The LaTeX support seems very nice. Nice job! The concept of a paper as a DVCS repository is a very natural one, and it's exactly how I would write my papers back in the day.

    I'm curious how the "host the data and the code" comes in. Perhaps you're supposed to clone the backing git repository and add the code to that, but I don't see how to do that yet. Early days.

  • by goldfeld on 3/7/13, 9:46 AM

    This is a great answer to all this "open up the papers" movement, and going forward a much better solution than those apps that cropped up for asking for a given research paper. If things remain open, that is. A github for papers sounds great, and an actual natural extension of the idea of github. Whereas github is pragmatic projects, authorea is the step before that.
  • by interconnector on 3/7/13, 3:51 AM

    ShareLaTeX is also worth checking out: https://www.sharelatex.com/
  • by yannis on 3/7/13, 1:23 PM

    Strange enough I had a very similar idea see http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/83588/latex-mark-up-a... and made a prototype. Would be glad to share ideas if you want. Please contact via tex.sx chat.
  • by icelancer on 3/7/13, 9:19 AM

    Thank god. I have been planning on writing a bunch of papers to publish on my website and all of the options have been awful.

    So far, it looks great. Thanks for the service. Can't wait to try it out.

  • by lsiebert on 3/7/13, 7:46 AM

    I'm on mobile, but does this have zotero integration?
  • by RichardPrice on 3/7/13, 6:53 AM

    Authorea is a great project. I love the idea of helping academics write their papers natively for the web. Good luck Nate and Alberto!
  • by toomim on 3/7/13, 5:37 AM

    FUCK YHEAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

    I'M GOING TO USE THIS RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Just like, update to the internet, man. I want my articles to look beautiful on the web, not just in antiquated print journals!!!!!

    Why, in 2013 do references need to look like this (Johnson-Kines et al., 1533) when we have HYPERLINKS on the web??? And you can show a little snippet in a tooltip--or the actual quote or line of the document that you're referencing?

    Where are my embedded videos?