11/06/13

Introducing Authorea, an online collaborative platform for creating and sharing dynamic articles that are built

for the modern web

Nathan Jenkins, Alberto Pepe

11/06/13

Beginnings

DOB: January 2012

Initial idea focused on modernizing the article

Figures should be more than figures

Data should be easy to find, easy to share

For a given figure, the relevant data should live alongside, or inside, that figure.

Same goes for analysis

Share everything

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Platform Choice

Extending the PDF format would be hard

Web is great for text + dynamic content, sharing is easy

Could have built off of an existing platform

Could have reimplemented the standard desktop workflow on the web

Decided to start from a clean slate.

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The Fun Stuff

Authorea is built in Ruby on Rails, a rather amazing web framework built in about the best language ever, Ruby.

A slew of other open source technologies have been invaluable:

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Design Considerations

Article format should be as simple as possible

Article, including versioning, is completely contained within a folder

Everything specified in text files

Things should be easy by default

No Latex compiler needed

Easy to add figures

Version control should just work

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Demo Time

Wish Me Luck !

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One click submit to a variety of journals in XML

WYSIWIG Markdown editor

Full Git push/pull access

Generalized executable figures using virtual machines

PDF Export

Word Import

Coming Soon (1 month)

New Features

Harder, but possible (6 months)

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Figures For the Near Future

Tools like Mathematica's CDF have given us executable figures, but limited to a specific language

Hard to generalize

Three ways to accommodate:

For the javascripters, possibility to embed figures directly into article, leverage toolkits such as d3.js

For the pythonistas, linking between figures and the amazing Ipython

For everyone else, virtual machines

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Figures With Virtual Machines

Authorea creates a blank virtual machine

Author configures machine

Snapshot this machine

A third party reader will now see a 'Launch Analysis' button.

Spin up a new instance

11/06/13

Thanks For Listening!