Top team at technology firm sees strategic moves

In a major milestone for fast-growing technology company Overleaf, its CEO and Co-founder John Hammersley is moving on from his position to take up a broader role within parent company Digital Science as VP Researcher and Community Engagement.

Directly reporting to Digital Science CEO Daniel Hook, Dr Hammersley will continue to champion and promote Overleaf, but will also be looking more widely at how Digital Science can best serve the broad research community, with a particular focus on the end users of all its different products. 

As a result of this change, John is handing over the day-to-day running of Overleaf to its senior team. Lee Shalit will be moving from her COO/CFO role to take on the CEO role. Mary Anne Baynes will expand her remit as Chief Commercial Officer and become President, while Co-founder and CTO John Lees-Miller will continue to lead the Product and Engineering side of the business, with a new focus on B2C growth. These changes take effect from today.

Part of Digital Science, SaaS company Overleaf enables its users to collaboratively write, edit and publish scientific documents, with an editing tool that utilizes the open-sourced LaTeX (pronounced either LAH-tek or LAY-tek) document preparation system.

Overleaf is the world’s market leader in this collaboration technology, with more than 10 million users worldwide. The service assists academics, students and organizations to effectively and efficiently collaborate, publish and share their work, helping to make science and research faster, more accessible and more transparent. 

John Hammersley says: “I’ve had an amazing time over the past 10 years, helping Overleaf grow into the success it is today, and when I look back it’s hard to believe all the things we’ve done together! Now felt like the right time to step into a role that allows me to take the core of Overleaf’s values and ethos to an even broader audience, and one which is still very connected with the community that enabled Overleaf to grow so successfully.

“I’m looking forward to continuing to work with researchers and their institutions in my new role, as Overleaf is very much leading the way in helping researchers and students and I’m aiming to bring some of that learning into Digital Science. 

“I’d like to thank Lee, Mary Anne and John for stepping up into their new roles, and I’m excited to see how they take Overleaf forward with everyone’s support. This is an opportunity for Overleaf to continue to grow as a significant and influential part of Digital Science, not only with my new contribution to Digital Science overall, but with a renewed focus from Lee, Mary Anne and John on the company culture and continued commercial growth,” he says.

New President Mary Anne Baynes says: “I couldn’t be more excited, humbled and proud to be asked to expand my role to President of Overleaf. The incredible growth and success I’ve seen over the past (almost) eight years has been unbelievable! Overleaf helps millions of people all over the world write and collaborate on research – helping bring research and innovation to the world more quickly and easily. What an amazing organization!”

Daniel Hook, CEO of Digital Science, says: “John and the Overleaf team have done amazing work over the last decade to make Overleaf into a much-loved tool by researchers.  Our aspiration across Digital Science has always been to help researchers to achieve more and hence I am so pleased that John has agreed to work at the center of Digital Science to engage more with the researcher community around the world to ensure that all our tools are as loved as Overleaf has become.”

Overleaf’s new CEO Lee Shalit adds: “John Hammersley and John Lees-Miller have taken Overleaf from an idea to a widely used and loved platform, all around the world.  This is the legacy that will always be part of us, and now it’s time to take it to the next level. I joined Overleaf because I believed in the platform and the good things it brings to people, and together, with digital transformation all around us, we will ensure that Overleaf is truly ‘the go-to place for scientific writing’ for researchers, students and enterprises in five and 10 years from now.”

About Overleaf
Overleaf was founded in 2012 by two mathematicians who built a light-weight collaboration system and used it for writing research papers. It was simple and intuitive to use – all you needed was a web browser. This intuitive online platform has since seen rapid adoption across science and research, and Overleaf’s award-winning collaboration technology is now in use by over 10 million researchers, students and technical writers in institutions, labs and industry worldwide.

Part of Digital Science, and working in collaboration with international publishers and organizations, Overleaf is helping to make science and research faster, more accessible and more transparent by bringing the whole scientific writing process into one connected place in the cloud — from idea, to writing, to review, to publication.

About Digital Science
Digital Science is a technology company working to make research more efficient. We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open and effective. Our portfolio includes admired brands Altmetric, Dimensions, Figshare, ReadCube, Symplectic, IFI CLAIMS, Overleaf, Ripeta and Writefull. We believe that together, we can help researchers make a difference. Visit www.digital-science.com and follow @digitalsci on Twitter.

Media contacts

Jamie Liu, Marketing Manager, Overleaf: +1 (202) 417-6343, jamie.liu@overleaf.com

David Ellis, Press, PR & Social Manager, Digital Science: Mobile +61 447 783 023, d.ellis@digital-science.com

The post Overleaf accelerates into new era appeared first on Digital Science.

Cloud-based software company grows by one million users in just five months

Cloud-based software company Overleaf has reached 10 million users in 189 countries around the world, thanks to strong and sustained user growth among university academics, students, research institutions and industry.

The 10 million user milestone has been achieved just five months after Overleaf reached its nine millionth, and well ahead of the company’s 10th birthday in December 2022.

Part of Digital Science, Overleaf enables its users to collaboratively write, edit and publish scientific documents, with an editing tool that utilises the open-sourced LaTeX (pronounced either LAH-tek or LAY-tek) document preparation system.

This service assists academics, students, and researchers in industry to effectively and efficiently collaborate, publish and share their work, helping to make science and research faster, more accessible and more transparent.

Overleaf is the world’s market leader in this collaboration technology and typically has more than 400,000 active users of its editing services every day.

More than ever we’re achieving our mission of helping academics, students and those in industry to collaborate and bring their research results to the world.”

John Hammersley

Co-founder and CEO, Overleaf

“I want to thank our worldwide community of 10 million users for their enormous support,” says John Hammersley, Co-founder and CEO of Overleaf.

“To have started the company in 2012 with just a handful of users, and seeing that handful become thousands within months — that was an exciting feeling. But to now see our small company achieve 10 million users, that is beyond any of our expectations.

“We’re excited that there’s been such huge growth in the uptake of our online editor. More than ever we’re achieving our mission of helping academics, students and those in industry to collaborate and bring their research results to the world.

“What I’m especially pleased about is that our Overleaf users have grown into a supportive, global community, in which the end result is better, faster, more accessible, and above all more collaborative research,” Dr Hammersley says.

The benefits of Overleaf’s editing tools have been highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which key scientific research has been written up on Overleaf and then released into the world.

“This was especially critical during the early stages of the pandemic, such as the rapid production of a paper on the effectiveness of mask wearing against COVID-19, which was made possible in part through the authors’ use of Overleaf,” Dr Hammersley says.

“This is just one way in which Overleaf can have an important impact on our world — and there will be millions of other users out there who are also making an important contribution to their field and to society.”

A quick overview of Overleaf:

• 10 million individual users
• 189 countries represented
• More than 6800 universities with students, faculty and staff using Overleaf
• More than 2000 companies and other research institutions
• 11 million collaborations
• 87 million projects

“These amazing statistics show a bright future ahead for research collaboration,” says Overleaf’s Chief Commercial Officer, Mary Anne Baynes.

“While those most represented in our Overleaf community are typically from computer science, engineering and technology, mathematics and physics backgrounds, we’re proud to see that our community has expanded beyond the traditional STEM fields — we now have economists, linguists, logicians and more using Overleaf every day.

“The diversity of our community continues to motivate us to explore new ways of making the collaborative authoring experience even easier. We are also working to ensure that Overleaf is more accessible to people with disabilities,” Ms Baynes says.

About Digital Science

Digital Science is a technology company working to make research more efficient. We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open and effective. Our portfolio includes admired brands Altmetric, Dimensions, Figshare, ReadCube, Symplectic, IFI CLAIMS, GRID, Overleaf, Ripeta and Writefull. We believe that together, we can help researchers make a difference. Visit www.digital-science.com and follow @digitalsci on Twitter.

About Overleaf

Overleaf was founded in 2012 by two mathematicians who built a light-weight collaboration system and used it for writing research papers. It was simple and intuitive to use – all you needed was a web browser. This intuitive online platform has since seen rapid adoption across science and research, and Overleaf’s award-winning collaboration technology is now in use by over 10 million researchers, students and technical writers in institutions, labs and industry worldwide. 

Part of Digital Science, and working in collaboration with international publishers and organisations, Overleaf is helping to make science and research faster, more accessible and more transparent by bringing the whole scientific writing process into one connected place in the cloud — from idea, to writing, to review, to publication.

Media contacts

Jamie Liu, Marketing Manager, jamie.liu@overleaf.com

David Ellis, Press, PR & Social Manager, Digital Science: d.ellis@digital-science.com

The post Overleaf reaches 10 million users worldwide appeared first on Digital Science.

Publisher extends its commitment to open science by offering authors first integrated route for data deposition

Springer Nature and Figshare have launched a free pilot to better support authors in making their data openly available. Authors submitting to a number of Nature research journals and Academic Journals will now be able to easily opt into data sharing, via Figshare, as part of one integrated submission process.

The availability of data is central to open science and integral to the reproducibility of research and therefore the advancement of knowledge. Research on the impact of data sharing shows that when data is openly available, articles receive over 25% more citations. However, despite the positive impact of sharing data and willingness from authors, less than 40% actually make their data available. Reasons for this include a lack of understanding, difficulties in how to deposit data, convoluted processes, or challenges around correctly linking data and articles.

This pilot builds on a longstanding commitment from Springer Nature to open data – including automatic deposition of supplementary Information for BMC and SpringerOpen journals, enhanced curation support for authors and integration at our flagship data journal Scientific Data.

Speaking of the pilot, Meredith LeMasurier, Vice President Journals, Fully OA Portfolio commented:

“Open Data has an essential role in increasing the credibility of research – validating data so that researchers can trust it, and combating scientific misinformation so that wider society can trust it. Yet there are still some barriers and hesitations around both the development and adoption of open data and open research solutions.

“Integrating data sharing more seamlessly into an author’s submission workflow removes the challenge faced by many authors of having to find a suitable repository, registering and linking data – all admin heavy tasks. It supports straightforward and simple guidance, drives best practice, improves data sharing and creates a better foundation for reader engagement. We are incredibly proud to be collaborating further with Figshare to help develop standards, tools and services to better support sustainable open research, and therefore open science practice.”

The pilot will initially include Nature research journals and Academic Journals portfolios across the fields of neuroscience, ecology and evolution, chemistry, energy, cancer and transplantation. Working closely with researchers throughout, the pilot will explore and test out more integrated ways for data sharing.

“It’s inspiring to see incremental leaps in the Nature Research and Academic Journals team. The fact that hard work is going into making life easier for researchers, as well as moving towards sustainable, open research data is massively encouraging,” said Mark Hahnel, Figshare CEO.

More on Springer Nature’s approach to open research and open science can be found here. Eugenie Regan’s, VP Research Solutions, blog on open research at Springer Nature.

About Springer Nature

For over 175 years Springer Nature has been advancing discovery by providing the best possible service to the whole research community. We help researchers uncover new ideas, make sure all the research we publish is significant, robust and stands up to objective scrutiny, that it reaches all relevant audiences in the best possible format, and can be discovered, accessed, used, re-used and shared. We support librarians and institutions with innovations in technology and data; and provide quality publishing support to societies.
As a research publisher, Springer Nature is home to trusted brands including Springer, Nature Portfolio, BMC, Palgrave Macmillan and Scientific American. For more information, please visit springernature.com and @SpringerNature

About Figshare

Figshare, part of Digital Science, offers a highly configurable storage solution to provide access to publishers’ datasets and supplementary material with a dedicated repository portal and in-article viewer. Figshare’s out-of-the-box software is designed to meet requirements for security, accessibility, and global repository standards, such as preservation, persistence, metadata, and discoverability. Visit figshare.com and follow @figshare on Twitter.

Media contacts

Megan Hardeman, Product Marketing Manager, Figshare: megan@figshare.com

Sam Sule, Communications, Springer Nature: sam.sule@springernature.com

David Ellis, Press, PR & Social Manager, Digital Science: d.ellis@digital-science.com

The post Springer Nature and Figshare announce pilot to improve data sharing appeared first on Digital Science.

Joy is an experienced award-winning Founding Director, skilled in team building, management, data analysis, and business strategy. She has experience in Research Capacity, Higher Education, Research Analytics, and Donor and Government Relations. She is the Executive Director of the Training Centre in Communication, based in the University of Nairobi, Kenya. The centre provides capacity support in improving researchers output and visibility through training in scholarly and science communication.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

African proverb

This proverb rings true as we celebrate Africa Day and highlight the way that partnerships have been instrumental in supporting the accessibility and visibility of African research through Open Access.

The TCC Africa team were recently invited by Kenya’s grants council, the National Research Fund, to train researchers from 15 universities from this region on open science and how it helps in improving research output and increasing visibility. Going by road made so much sense as I needed time and inspiration to write this blog, and what better inspiration is there than the beautiful Kenyan countryside. As we drove down the Great Rift Valley, we passed lush green hills, the air fresh from last night’s rain. It is a long 400 km drive from Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city, to Kisumu, another city located by Lake Victoria, the world’s ninth-largest continental lake.

One of the Goals and Priority Areas of Agenda 2063, is “A Prosperous Africa, based on Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development” and is a principle of UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17, which focuses on partnerships for the goals. Since 2018 and the launch of Plan S, the increased use of Open Access has been evident, with the need for effective access and usage of various Open Access research solutions. At the heart of this process is a paradigm shift with the rise of Open Access research discovery citation databases, which have taken over similar traditionally paywalled options.

The result of these developments has led to a demand for access and effective usage of Open Access citation databases in the Global South, and the best way to effectively action this is through collaboration.

African researchers have taken advantage of open science and Open Access, as evidenced by the increase of Open Access publications. Open science publishing infrastructures like the Africa Academy of Sciences Open Research Platform and African community led preprint repository AfricArxiv has led to innovative Open Access publishing offering rapid publication and open review whilst supporting data deposition, with the former supporting African Academy of Sciences fellows, and the latter supporting research done by Africans or non-Africans conducting research on and about Africa.

Since 2018, African researchers have produced over 400 thousand publications, with 50% of these being Open Access. It is also clear that year on year African research output has been steadily increasing. In Africa, TCC Africa’s approach to effectively working with Digital Science in providing support in accessibility of the Open Access research discovery solution Dimensions is multifold. Dimensions has partnered with Research4Life, a charity research organization providing Open Access research solutions to researchers in the Global South, to allow its community to discover research information and enable its users to gain actionable insights into research trends using the Dimensions platform. What we did as a centre was go a step further and work with the higher education stakeholders in Sub-Saharan countries to make sure users in African countries were comfortable in accessing and using Dimensions.

The reason we did this is that, for the longest time, higher education stakeholders worked in silos. Each higher education institute (HEI) has an expectation of researchers to produce good quality outputs and increase their visibility. By bringing them together they can seamlessly provide uniform access to Dimensions in their respective countries. We brought together research councils, granting councils, university commissions and library consortia and trained them in using Dimensions to support their academic and research communities using open science.

How does this work? As gatekeepers, library consortia are responsible for the negotiation and access to literary resources used in their institutes, while research councils regulate and monitor output done by research institutes, and granting councils fund research and the university commissions are responsible for regulating and monitoring universities performance. All these HEIs and other higher education stakeholders agree on the importance of open science, its philosophy, and how Open Access can support increasing research output and visibility coming out of their countries.

In order to make a change to the whole research lifecycle, these different stakeholders understood that they had to work together and be of one voice when it came to open science and seamlessly implementing an Open Access citation database such as Dimensions across each of their respective countries.

Though you may expect such a process to be difficult, it has been received positively, predominantly based on the underlying premise about how open science can support the academic and research ecosystem in each of these countries.

In Kenya, the National Research Fund grants council and the Kenya Libraries and Information Services Consortium have joined forces to support the Kenyan academic community in seamless access to Dimensions, with the former providing research capacity support on training researchers on how to use the database and the latter providing easier access within their institutes and also training their respective institutes. The National Council for Science and Technology, Malawi’s research council, works closely with the Malawi Library Consortium in supporting their academic community in accessing and using Dimensions for research discovery.

The Zambia Library Information Consortium and the research and granting council National Science and Technology Council have agreed to work together to support their academic community in providing seamless access and effective use of Dimensions. This began with a national webinar explaining the process in March 2021.

In Botswana the Department of Research, Science and Technology (DRST) through the Ministry of Tertiary Education, Research, Science and Technology and the Botswana Library Consortium have agreed to work together in supporting their academic community in providing access to Dimensions, complete with capacity building resource. Similar discussions are ongoing with more HEIs in the continent, as they are keen to look at ways in which they can support their academic communities.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has taught us the importance of collaboration and of Open Access, and demonstrated how both are beneficial to scientific advancement, and necessary to move science forward to combat current and future challenges. Last year’s Digital Science report, How COVID-19 is Changing Research Culture, showed how many more preprints have been published since the start of the pandemic compared to before, and the impact that this has had on the speed of medical innovation, and the potential lasting impact this will have on how research is carried out in the future. By forging partnerships across African HEIs to foster open science and collaboration, we can help researchers make the greatest possible impact through their work.

This 54 country continent is a geographical jigsaw, with a land area of 30.4 million sq km (11.7 million sq mi) – enough to accommodate the U.S., China, India, Japan, Mexico, and many European nations, combined. The African continent is mired with a varied political economy, and is united under the African Union’s edict on partnerships. Working towards SDG 17 has been essential in conducting research building global relationships and nationally breaking down HEI silos in a bid to provide seamless access and use of Open Access solutions. By working together in such partnerships, African research will make an even greater impact on the global research landscape.

The post Supporting accessibility and visibility of African research through Open Access appeared first on Digital Science.

In over a decade of creating research university collaboration diagrams, the response that I’ve come to expect when presenting them is usually, “Pretty isn’t it…”, followed by a pause, and then, “…what does it mean?” – which is fair enough. Collaboration graphs without any surrounding narrative can really only be encountered as art. Identifying interesting features in a network requires some knowledge of how they were made.

That said, research collaboration graphs do play a productive role in highlighting the cultural differences between different types of disciplines and institutions. In our 2019 project, ‘What does a University look like?’, we showed that a large-scale comprehensive institution looks very different to an institution focused on science and engineering. Country-level differences in culture can also be seen. For example, two related posters in this project highlight the differences between a distributed system of institutions in New Zealand that focuses on different and complementary areas of research, and a larger university sector in Australia that produces many more comprehensive and competing institutions. Coming soon after the launch of Dimensions, the original 2019 project showcased both the quality of the research network and research classifications within Dimensions, while demonstrating how much it was possible to do with the Dimensions API – though it did take a while to download all the data! With the launch of Dimensions on Google BigQuery and the ability to gather the data for networks in seconds rather than hours, I thought I would revisit the project again, this time with a focus on narrative. Imagine you are in a gallery, standing in front of a large framed picture of a network diagram.   What story does it tell you? It is most likely to be a story about the interplay and size of disciplines within an institution. How does physics interact with medicine? How does engineering connect with both the biological sciences and pure chemistry? Where are the intersections with education? In exploring these questions we also gain a sense of distance between disciplines. In this way, network diagrams act as a map as our eyes wander across a landscape of cooperation.

A story that tells us how disciplines are connected requires knowledge of where researchers are from. Using Dimensions we can assign a discipline to an individual by looking for the research classification that they most commonly publish in. Dimensions has many different classifications to choose from however, as the human eye can only differentiate a limited number of colours, I chose to use the Units of Assessment classification created in the UK for the Research Excellence Framework (the REF) as a high level, yet sufficiently broad scheme. Exploring interconnecting disciplines also requires a way to group researchers that are working together. To shift focus from individuals to groups within the network I used the Leiden algorithm from CWTS (also used in VOSviewer) to identify well-connected clusters of researchers. Having already used colour to indicate discipline, clusters are highlighted on the graph by hiding the links between clusters and accentuating the links within a cluster through the use of edge bundling. Clusters that are related to each other can be inferred by their proximity on the network, as well as the discipline mix of researchers within the cluster.   In an analogous method to assigning a discipline to each researcher, I assigned a colour to the edges within a cluster based on the majority discipline of the researchers within it.

As clusters have been derived independently from the algorithm that lays out the network, the final challenge is to differentiate between clusters that overlap across the network. Indeed, it is often interesting to identify instances when they do. To handle this, I chose to animate the graph, highlighting each cluster above a certain size in sequence, starting with Clinical Medicine (A01), and moving progressively through the Units of Assessment through science, engineering, social sciences, and the humanities. In this way, the network is presented as a tour through the disciplines providing a narrative structure for the entire network.  As Units of Assessments are quite broad, I also used the Fields of Research categorisation at the 4 digit level to provide another description for each cluster. By highlighting the four researchers within a cluster that have published the most, each cluster gains a further identity. To help identify clusters from different disciplines that overlap with one another, I created a 3-dimensional model of the network and gave each Unit of Assessment a different layer in the representation. Unit of Assessment A01 (Clinical Science) forms the base of the diagram. From there the layers move up through medicine, engineering, sciences, and humanities. The end result, created in this case for the University of Cambridge, is presented below. Pretty isn’t it? Although hopefully now the story it has to tell is embedded in the encounter.

Some Additional Technical Things of Note This project makes use of a new graph layout engine called BatchLayout, which I use in conjunction with Graphviz to reduce the number of overlapping nodes. Edge bundling is achieved using the Datashader library. Although the end result is rendered in Blender, all of the 2D development was rendered using matplotlib. You can find a Google Colab Notebook with all the steps up to 3D rendering here. The code for the whole project, including the Python script that builds the network in Blender can be found in my Gigantum repository here. Gigantum was really helpful here, as it made it easy to switch between my local computer for development, and a more powerful machine that didn’t mind being on for several days for 3D rendering. Have a go yourself, and tell us how you get along!

The post Bringing narrative to research collaboration networks in 3D appeared first on Digital Science.

In this paper published in Frontiers Research Metrics and Analytics, Daniel W Hook, Simon J Porter, Hélène Draux and Christian T Herzog propose the concept of “real-time” bibliometrics as a new capability for researchers, policymakers and analysts across the sector.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted a different set of needs to analyze trends in scholarship as they occur: Real-time bibliometrics. The combination of full-text search, daily data updates, a broad set of scholarly objects including pre-prints and a wider set of data fields for analysis, broadens opportunities for a different style of analysis. A subset of these emerging capabilities is discussed and three basic analyses are presented as illustrations of the potential for real-time bibliometrics.

Read more

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One in every 25 publications that appeared on Dimensions in 2020 refers to COVID-19. Daniel Hook and Simon Porter look at where the resources to support all this research activity have come from, and which research fields are losing out. You can read the full article published in Nature Index.

Read more

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This document provides an overview of the Dimensions content. Feel free to reach out to the Dimensions team if you want to discuss further whether the content scope and coverage of Dimensions can help in your specific situation and use case.

The post A Guide to the Dimensions Data Approach appeared first on Digital Science.

The post Using Overleaf for Technical Documentation appeared first on Digital Science.

Overleaf has updated its popular collaborative writing and publishing tool to offer enhanced collaboration and editing features. Bringing together the best features of both the original Overleaf and ShareLaTeX tools into a single cloud-based platform, the new Overleaf has been designed to enable students and researchers at academic institutions, industrial laboratories, technology companies and publishers to benefit from a powerful centralized documentation process.

“Overleaf is now firmly established as a leading tool in both research and education, serving a community of over 2.9 million users worldwide, from high school students through to experienced researchers and writers. Launching this new platform just over a year since Overleaf and ShareLaTeX joined forces is a testament to the immense work of the combined team, as well as to the valuable feedback on the beta version kindly shared by our users,” said John Hammersley, co-founder and CEO of Overleaf. “And with over 200,000 people using the new platform straight away, it’s certainly been a busy September!”

As part of a philosophy of “ship early, ship often”, Overleaf introduced a beta version of the new Overleaf in May 2018. During the summer, a wealth of helpful feedback on the new platform’s functionality was provided by users, which has driven further development leading up to this month’s launch.

Addressing popular demand, the new Overleaf platform has been developed to offer a wide range of capabilities to support authors working both online and offline. Some of the updated platform features include:

• Real-time track changes and commenting – simplifying review, acceptance or rejection of text edits for faster and easier collaborative editing
• Private invitation, link sharing and chat functionality – facilitating new and more productive collaborations
• Auto-compiling and real-time preview – updating the PDF view so collaborators can focus on their writing
• Complementary Rich Text and LaTeX modes – flexing to a user’s preference for editing projects with/without working in the code
• Ability to import and sync external files (e.g. datasets, bibliographies) – integrating with resources from other projects or external sources
• Direct submission to journals and repositories – saving time and effort when submitting manuscripts
• Advanced reference search – facilitating simple search by author name, title, publisher, year or keyword for effortless and fast insertion of the correct citations
• Automatic two-way Dropbox/Github sync – supporting seamless transition between working offline to working online with other collaborators

Key to Overleaf’s success is its ease-of-use for users, as highlighted by Professor James Friend, Medically Advanced Devices Lab, University of California, San Diego: “I am really grateful for Overleaf. It has enabled a slew of research and teaching development in my work that would have been annoyingly difficult before. Even people who don’t know LaTeX are participating with me on research proposals.”

Inês Mendes, a microbioinformatics PhD student, tweeted, “I’ve been using Overleaf for about a week now and I have to say that I’m a fan! I never gravitated towards LaTeX before but Overleaf makes it so easy to work with. I highly recommend it!”

Overleaf is also helping journals to save time when publishing manuscripts. Ruth Isaacson, Managing Editor, GSA Journals, explained, “Overleaf decreased the amount of questions we receive and the amount of processing time required from LaTeX users—with Word users we still have to answer a lot of questions, and it takes a lot more of the editorial staff time.”

Similar benefits have been enjoyed by universities when processing student thesis submissions. At Purdue University, where a growing number (35%) of all STEM students now use the Purdue thesis template on Overleaf, workload and review times decreased in cases where students used Overleaf to write a thesis – falling from 5 or more graduate staff/student meetings per thesis to approximately 2–3 meetings per thesis. It is estimated that this removes the need for approximately a thousand meetings each year at this single institution.

“Doing great research has always been about an exchange of ideas: Communication and collaboration are at the centre of today’s best research,” said Daniel Hook, CEO, Digital Science. “The new Overleaf removes yet more barriers to communication and collaboration, taking us a step closer to frictionless research.”

By the end of the year, the new platform will enable direct Git access to projects, Zotero bibliography imports and additional publisher submission links, as well as an upgrade to Overleaf’s on-premise offering to include the new platform features.

To learn more about Overleaf, please visit https://www.overleaf.com

For press enquiries please contact

Mary Anne Baynes
Chief Marketing Officer, Overleaf
maryanne.baynes@overleaf.com

About Overleaf
Overleaf was founded in 2012 by two mathematicians who built a light-weight collaboration system and used it for writing research papers. It was simple and intuitive to use – all you needed was a web browser. This intuitive online platform has since seen rapid adoption across science and research, and Overleaf’s award-winning collaboration technology is now in use by over 2.9 million researchers, students and technical writers in institutions, labs and industry worldwide. Part of Digital Science, and working in collaboration with international publishers and organizations, Overleaf is helping to make science and research faster, more open and more transparent by bringing the whole scientific writing process into one connected place in the cloud – from idea, to writing, to review, to publication. In mid-2017 Overleaf acquired its nearest competitor ShareLaTeX, and our expanded team worked together to build an even stronger next-generation platform. Visit www.overleaf.com or follow us on Twitter @overleaf

About Digital Science
Digital Science is a technology company working to make research more efficient. We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open and effective. Our portfolio includes admired brands including Altmetric, Anywhere Access, Dimensions, Figshare, ReadCube, Symplectic, IFI Claims, GRID, Overleaf, Labguru, BioRAFT, TetraScience and Transcriptic. We believe that together, we can help researchers make a difference. Visit www.digital-science.com or follow us on Twitter @digitalsci.

Media contact

David Ellis, Press, PR & Social Manager, Digital Science: Mobile +61 447 783 023, d.ellis@digital-science.com

The post Overleaf Launches New Platform appeared first on Digital Science.

Academia-industry partnerships are usually a win-win situation. The institution receives funding and recognition; the company gets innovative products backed by scientific research. These partnerships allow companies to access to the expertise of highly qualified individuals. And we know that strong R&D teams form the foundation of every innovative organization. But small businesses often lose out here. SMEs, startups and small to mid-size labs do not have access to specialized talent. Hiring experts in-house, especially for short-term projects, can be impractical and unaffordable.

When it comes to collaboration within academia, we have proof that individual researchers also no longer want to work in isolation. As science becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, there are multiple overlaps in the skills and knowledge required for different fields of studies. According to a UNESCO report,

u003cemu003eOne in four scientific articles produced around the world were cosigned by a foreign collaborator in 2014, compared to one in five a decade earlier.u003c/emu003e

Countries all over the world are joining hands to help fuel research and innovation, in a political climate that is becoming alarmingly anti-science. Under Horizon 2020, the EU’s research and innovation programme, academia in the EU and the USA will be able to work together closely. An article published in Nature last year says that:

u003cemu003eThe leading edge of scientific discovery is now in the realm of international collaboration networks rather than individuals, institutions or nations.u003c/emu003eu003cbru003e

So where are the platforms that allow individual researchers to collaborate? Nature breaks down the usage of digital tools such as social media networks, Research Gate, Academia.edu and Mendeley. But do these platforms help in forming collaborative partnerships?

Nature found that a majority of scientists simply wanted to maintain a digital presence in case anyone wanted to reach out to them.Typically, researchers and postdocs still network at traditional academic conferences. But attending a scientific conference can be an expensive and time-consuming affair.  While reliable statistics are hard to come by, a report published by IEEE in 2007 finds that their average conference registration fee was $451. However, the registration fee only accounts for 24% of total costs, while airfare and hotel costs take up 26% and 24% respectively. And attending a conference is only the first step – you have to be in the right place at the right time and get the right person to notice your work. And most importantly, you need the right social skills.Researchers, who already spend a bulk of their time trying to achieve results and get them published, often dread having to network in person.

Kolabtree is an online platform that is helping to bridge this gap, by making scientific talent more affordable and accessible. We connect businesses and labs to PhD-qualified experts for short-term projects, helping them overcome geographical barriers, limited funding and restrictive policies. We believe that there is a real need, now more than ever, for scientists and industries to collaborate with each other and among themselves. Kolabtree’s 2700+ global pool of experts include scientists, data analysts, statisticians, writers and editors from institutions such as NASA, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, and more. Our platform allows you to upload a project, receive bids from experts and work with the the expert of your choice. You choose the budget and release a payment only if you’re satisfied with the outcome. Our interface allows you to also interact with each expert who’s bid for your project before selecting one who’s best suited for your requirements.

We’ve been surprised and thrilled at the kind of projects we’ve received. Through Kolabtree, a social science researcher in the USA successfully worked with an astrophysicist in the UK to analyze huge data sets. An Amazon reseller in the US hired a data analyst from the Netherlands who helped him predict his sales over a period of time. A Brazilian open access journal was able to hire a team of global peer reviewers at short notice. Kolabtree’s become the one-stop shop for postdoc expertise across various subject areas, from biotechnology to mathematics.

We live in a time when we’re experiencing uncertainty, fear and hostility on a global level. With countries shutting down their borders, and the risk of reduced funding and freedom for science, we feel the need to encourage cross-border collaborations even more. We’ve also launched the initiative, #researchwithoutborders, that aims to showcase collaborative science and tech projects from around the world. We hope to help individuals and businesses the world over access the talent they’re seeking through our platform. It’s one step towards better collaboration and better innovation.

About the author

Ramya Sriram is a freelance writer and cartoonist. She currently manages digital content at Kolabtree (www.kolabtree.com), a London-based startup that connects labs and businesses to scientists from all over the world. Kolabtree’s experts include 2700+ PhD-qualified specialists across a wide range of subject areas from institutions like NASA, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and more. Their mission is to accelerate academia-business and academia-academia collaboration across multiple communities.

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