| Votes | By | Price | Discipline | Year Launched |
| Authorea | FREE | Interdisciplinary |
Authorea is a next-generation collaborative writing platform designed to streamline how researchers compose, manage, and publish scientific documents. Built with the needs of modern, distributed research teams in mind, Authorea combines real-time editing, rich formatting tools, data integration, and seamless version control to create a writing environment that matches today’s open-science expectations.
Unlike traditional word processors, Authorea natively supports LaTeX, Markdown, and rich-text—allowing authors to mix formats depending on their discipline and comfort. Figures, equations, tables, code snippets, and datasets can be embedded directly into the document, preserving transparency and reproducibility. Its Git-based versioning system ensures that every change is tracked, making it particularly valuable for multi-author papers, preprints, and technical reports.
A standout feature is the platform’s ability to publish instantly similar to arXiv, allowing researchers to share preprints, project notes, or living documents with persistent DOIs. This bridges the gap between drafting and public dissemination, making Authorea a useful tool for accelerating visibility and feedback.
The platform also integrates reference management, dataset attachments, Jupyter-like elements, and journal-specific templates, easing the transition from draft to submission-ready manuscript. While some advanced scientific authors may still prefer pure LaTeX environments, Authorea strikes a compelling balance between ease of use and technical capability.
Authorea ultimately represents a more open, transparent, and collaborative approach to scientific writing—one that aligns well with evolving norms around preprints, reproducibility, and global teamwork in research.