AUTHOREA: A STARTUP FOR SCIENTISTS TO SHARE AND ADVANCE RESEARCH

Another one of my articles published on Impakter - I interviewed the founder of Authorea, a startup for scientists to share and advance research. Here is his picture, his name is Alberto Pepe, he's a young Italian astrophysicist who now lives in New York:


And here is the start of the article:

You’d think that writing scientific papers today, with all the digital tools at hand, would be a breeze. But you’d be wrong. Scientific work is not helped along by the Internet but challenged by it.

Why?

Because scientists, for the most part, still follow traditional methods for sharing their research findings. Or, as young Italian astrophysicist Alberto Pepe put it in an interview with Il Corriere della Sera, a major Italian daily, “Scientists today produce 21st century research; they use the writing tools of the 20th century and force their writing into formats similar to those of the 18th century.”

In short, the way scientific articles are written goes back 400 years, and the ability to share information is stuck in a 1980s level of technology. Most of the scientific information published on major journals like Nature, Science, or the Lancet is behind paywalls; universities and research institutions spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for subscriptions.

Hence, the birth of the “open science” movement to try and break down the walls. But to breakdown paywalls is not enough. What is required are practical tools to do it, tools that, taken as a package, go well beyond what is normally available on the Internet.

This is where Authorea comes in. Started as a publishing platform dedicated to scientists, it is the brainchild of Alberto Pepe and Nathan Jenkins, a physicist from California. The two had met ten years ago at CERNin Geneva, the prestigious European Center for Nuclear Research; harassed by the drudgery of having to exchange drafts back and forth on collaborative research papers and disappointed to see all the hard data-crunching work disappear once the papers were published, they had often discussed what could be done to advance scientific work.

The rest of the story is on Impakter, click here to read.

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