We’ve already written a small entry on Authorea and it’s use for collaborative scientific writing. Here I’ll list a few of the major benefits/features that make it a perfect tool for collaborative writing which facilitates reproducibility.
Benefits of Authorea (in no particular order)
- online
- version controlled (via git)
- collaborative (in real time)
- access from anywhere on any device
- easy front-end but extremely powerful
- can write in LaTeX and/or Markdown and/or plain text
- No more screwing around with weird margin sliders and page layout tools and header settings
- simply throw in your text, edit the settings once, and watch all your text reflow into place
- citation manager is built in and extremely easy to use!
- bibliography is maintained for you
- reference formatting is left until the end and is automatically tailored to selected journal
- powerful commenting system
- data can be hosted and associated with the document (truly open access)
- real-time visualisations (interactive)
- integration of code blocks and highlighting
- integration of iPython notebooks (R is a work in progress)
- seamless mathematical equation support and rendering
- direct integration with publishers
- format citations and manuscript and submit to journals all in one click
- semantic, structured documents
- ability to host code and data along with the figures and text is a great move towards reproducibility and transparency