Santa Clara, CA – Atypon has announced today its acquisition of two authoring platforms – Authorea and Manuscripts – enabling the company to provide free HTML-first authoring and collaboration tools for researchers. Already used by over 200,000 researchers across the globe, these tools enable researchers to write, cite, collaborate, host data, and publish.
“We were incredibly impressed with the teams at Authorea and Manuscripts, and how they quickly developed innovative solutions to the challenges their founders faced in their own research careers,” said Atypon’s Chairman, Georgios Papadopoulos. “We share a vision to help researchers be successful – to provide them with tools that simplify their communications and help with organizing so they can spend more of their time progressing science and their careers.”
“Authorea’s mission has always been to accelerate scientific discovery,” said Alberto Pepe, a UCLA-trained information scientist and co-founder of Authorea. Manuscripts was also designed to re-imagine word processing for the modern scientist and is the creation of Matias Piipari, a University of Cambridge computational biologist PhD with a decade of experience building popular tools for researchers.
“Both Authorea and Manuscripts were founded out of common frustration with other writing tools that didn’t fully take into account the needs of researchers in a web-first world. Our teams envisioned all the things that researchers wanted to do – easily collaborate with co-authors, pull citations, upload data, and submit to preprints and journals,” added Pepe.
The coming months will see Atypon combining the best of Authorea and Manuscripts into a new, re-engineered, open-source authoring tool. The new product will enable a community of researchers and technologists at www.manuscripts.io to collaborate to create the next generation of scholarly authoring and document formatting solutions.
Atypon’s new authoring product will help researchers automatically follow publishers’ formatting guidelines, and offer publishers a modern web-first format and tools to integrate into JATS/XML- and PDF-based publishing pipelines.
The new product will be available for integration by all publishers, platforms, and other researcher tools.
“Publishing tools must be open to support a fundamental change toward the transparent, reproducible reporting of research,” said Matias Piipari. “I am thrilled to be working with Alberto and the rest of the Atypon team to realize an open, collaborative environment fit for the future of reproducible science.”
Matias Piipari will be attending this week’s Researcher to Reader conference in London, Monday and Tuesday, February 25 – 26.