Tuesday, October 9, 12:30 pm
Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East Room A, 2nd Floor
Most tools that scientists use for the preparation of scholarly manuscripts, such as Microsoft Word and LaTeX, function offline and do not account for the born-digital nature of research objects. Moreover, most authoring tools in use today are not designed for collaboration, and, as scientific collaborations grow in size, research transparency and the attribution of scholarly credit are at stake. In this roundtable discussion, I will argue that the tools that scientists use to write scholarly papers constitute a first major barrier to Open Science, as they lock content, figures, data, tables in a "coffin", preventing reuse and sharing. At the end of the presentation, I will introduce and demo Authorea, an authoring platform for research papers which adopts the web as its canvas. Authorea manuscripts are living, modular, collaborative web documents with a robust source and versioning control backend. Authorea is a spin-off initiative of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
About Alberto
Alberto Pepe is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and co-founder of Authorea, a science startup. At Harvard, he is the in-house information scientist at the Center for Astrophysics, a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Pepe is interested in the study of socio–technical systems: networks of people, artifacts, data and ideas. He recently obtained a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles with a dissertation on scientific collaboration networks. Prior to starting his Ph.D., Pepe worked in the Information Technology Department of CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland and in the Scientific Visualization Department of CINECA, the Italian Scientific Consortium, based at the University of Bologna. Pepe holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Astrophysics, both from University College London, U.K. He was born and raised in the wine-making town of Manduria, in Puglia, Southern Italy.