At Authorea we're constantly thinking about how to make research writing easier, faster, and more robust from initial idea all the way through publication. Beyond stressing over making Authorea an impeccable experience and tool for researchers, we also like to think outside of the box for new innovative features that may not be on our immediate radar but are things we'd like to focus on at some point in the near future. Authorea X, if you like.Today, we'd like to ask for your feedback on one of the new ideas we're working on. We actively sought your feedback when we redesigned our new editor and would like to continue to involve researchers in the development of Authorea as much as possible. After all, we're building a great experience for you!In our latest brainstorming session, we discussed how we could help researchers improve their writing beyond what we're currently doing.  Specifically, how could we make the writing process one informed by data?  We identified a few key things we thought were important to the researcher based on requests as well as on our own observations and came up with what we're tentatively calling: "the Authorea Fitbit of research writing."  The Authorea Fitbit of researchWhile there are numerous metrics aimed at measuring the output of a researcher and the impact of their work \cite{Abbott_2010}, there is no easy way to track how a researcher is writing.  Some researchers have started manually keeping track of their writing progress on Twitter like the online #acwrimo community or the "thesis-writing tracker" by Achintya Rao of CERN but this is somewhat laborious and really just added work.  We think we can do better than a daily tally.  We can automatically track your writing patterns and share with you in a useful dashboard your typical behavior as well as your progress over a certain period of time. With such a system we would hope to be able to provide answers to the following:What time do I write most frequently at?  What are the most common words that I use?  How frequently do I write?How many words am I writing per day, per week, and per year?These are the things that we think researchers may like to know and thus we started quickly mocking up what this could look like on Authorea.  Our mocks are just initial sketches, heavily inspired by Github, and we hope, with your feedback, that they could become something very useful to researchers.  What would you track about your writing if you could? Tweet at us @authorea or leave a comment on Facebook or this article! 

CAMBRIDGE, UK, Friday, January 13, 2017 -- Authorea, the leading online editor for writing and publishing research documents, is integrating eLife into its submission system to give authors more options for direct submission to journals.eLife, the non-profit initiative backed by leading research funding organizations and led by scientists, operates a platform for research communication that recognizes and encourages responsible practices in science. eLife is now working with Authorea to allow authors to write and submit research directly to the journal as quickly and easily as possible.eLife’s partnership with Authorea aims to reduce the burden of submission on authors. A new document editor for researchers, Authorea makes it easy to write research documents and to host these online or submit them to journals for publication.Authorea gives authors the ability to write in multiple markup languages and host documents directly as standalone preprints. There are also hundreds of export styles for these documents, and Authorea’s recent integration with EJournalPress (EJPress) provides a direct link to eLife, simplifying the journal submission process.Josh Nicholson, Chief Research Officer at Authorea, says: "We're excited to partner with eLife, a major innovator in research publishing. eLife is an ideal submission destination for the tens of thousands of researchers who use Authorea to write groundbreaking research, and we look forward to partnering with eLife to help scientists gain great exposure for their discoveries."Melissa Harrison, Head of Production Operations at eLife, adds: “We’re delighted to be working with Authorea to make the submission process easier for authors. We hope to see this and other partnerships continue over the coming months, so that we can provide our authors with the best possible writing and publishing tools available to them.”For more information, please contact:Emily Packer, Press Officer, eLifee.packer@elifesciences.org01223 855373Adyam Ghebre, Outreach, Authoreaadyam@authorea.com+1 (646) 598-9285About eLifeeLife is a unique collaboration between the funders and practitioners of research to improve the way important research is selected, presented, and shared. eLife publishes outstanding works across the life sciences and biomedicine -- from basic biological research to applied, translational, and clinical studies. All papers are selected by active scientists in the research community. Responses are consolidated by the Reviewing Editor into a single, clear set of instructions for authors, removing the need for laborious cycles of revision and allowing authors to publish their findings quickly. eLife is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust. Learn more at elifesciences.org.About AuthoreaAuthorea is the online document editor for research and the place where scientific collaboration happens. Authorea is trusted worldwide by leading researchers writing and publishing content in every discipline, from astrophysics to zoology. The online document editor supports a wide range of markup languages and scientific integrations, including the most popular citation management, graphing, and visualization plugins. Authorea is on a mission to accelerate science through a superior web-based research-writing platform that delivers powerful tools and capabilities to researchers.

Dr. David Ochoa is a Postdoc in Pedro Beltrao’s lab at EMBL-EBI studying human kinase regulation, one of our cells most active mechanisms for controlling cellular behavior.  Ochoa discusses with us why he performed this research and how it was accomplished, a collaboration across three different countries and labs.  He highlights the significance of his findings and and why he choose Authorea to write up his research.  You can read more about David's work here.

NEW YORK, NY, January 18, 2016 -- Sample of Science and the collaborative writing platform Authorea have partnered to empower researchers around the world to share materials samples more efficiently. Development of novel materials is a growing area of research and the Sample of Science and the Authorea partnership makes it easier for researchers to write brief descriptions of their materials and share the samples with other scientists."Sample of Science is solving an important problem in the field of chemistry and materials sciences. We are happy that Authorea can serve as the writing platform for submissions to Sample of Science. If samples from experiments are made more openly accessible, it can help make research more efficient -- something we value greatly” said Alberto Pepe, CEO of Authorea. “Authorea and Sample of Science share a passion for giving researchers great tools that help them do better work.”Sharing samples of newly synthesized materials is an important step in the research cycle. For example, a carbon material developed in Berlin can subsequently be validated or utilized by research groups in Boston. Scientists who want to increase the visibility of their research and facilitate new experiments can write brief descriptions of their novel materials samples using the Authorea platform. All materials, together with brief descriptions, will be made available on the Sample of Science portal.Felix Evert, managing director of Sample of Science, is certain that the partnership will improve the research process for scientists who synthesize novel materials. “Better science is all about enabling researchers to disseminate the right information more efficiently. Authorea is an excellent digital writing tool. The lean online template for submission of brief sample descriptions is ideal for chemists and materials scientists who want to communicate their findings quickly," Evert explains. For more information, please visit: Sample of Science was founded in 2015 as a digital platform which connects researchers synthesizing novel materials with researchers who need them. The platform publishes open access description of novel materials and facilitates interdisciplinary collaborations based on materials from experiments. The company is located at the Freie Universität Berlin which is also one of the first cooperation partners of Sample of Science. www.sampleofscience.com    Felix Evert    Phone +49 162 276 2928    felix.evert@sampleofscience.comAuthorea is the online document editor for researchers that is accelerating scientific discover. Authorea is trusted worldwide by leading researchers writing and publishing content in every discipline, from astrophysics to zoology. The online document editor supports a wide range of markup languages and scientific integrations, including the most popular citation management, graphing, and visualization plugins. www.authorea.com    Adyam Ghebre    Phone +1 646 598-9285    adyam@authorea.com

Authorea is on a mission to build the best research document editor and publishing platform ever made. We believe that the best way to accelerate scientific discovery is to give full control of document creation and distribution to the researcher, and that the best way to do that is to build a web-based editor that enables researchers to collaborate and disseminate their work seamlessly.Authorea,  like many research projects, started with a question: Why is the research writing process so slow? We started with the rough notion that the internet age was failing to deliver optimal tools for things like collaborative writing and submitting works to publishers.  We refined this core idea and launched Authorea two years ago.Since then, we've devoted tens of thousands of hours to understand how to build software that makes it easier for researchers to do groundbreaking work. At the beginning of this year, we started building our new editor -- Authorea Beta -- the editor that will bring Authorea to the mainstream to benefit researchers in every discipline.Today, we're happy to share with you Authorea Beta. Writing research online has tremendous potential for collaboration, dissemination, and discovery. We're here to bring writing online to researchers and we'll be with you every step. 

Authorea: our pitch.It has been said that in order to cure cancer, we must first cure cancer research. At Authorea we're improving how researchers work and make breakthrough discoveries by tackling one of the most important parts of the research cycle, which is as important as research itself: scientific communication. Our mission is to reinvent the scientific article - the main vehicle of scientific dissemination - that hasn’t changed in format and scope since the birth of the scientific method. We're bringing the power of the modern web to a process that has not changed in 400 years in order to make research more open, collaborative, accessible, transparent and data-driven. In scientific terms, we're a paradigm shift. Join us as we write the future of research, literally.

Achintya Rao, a science communicator who works with the CMS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, is currently pursuing his PhD in Science Communication. We first met Achintya when chatting with him through our support chat and then later in person at OpenCon 2016, where he gave a talk on Open Data and Culture Change at CERN. We're pleased Achintya uses Authorea and we enjoyed following up with him here to learn more about his research and how he uses Authorea for it.

Authorea was built to foster collaboration amongst researchers writing together.  Founded, built, and tested by physicists and engineers, our editor was initially geared towards heavy technical writing. In short, we were built to make it easy to write Markdown and LaTeX collaboratively online, because selfishly that was how we (n=3) wrote our own papers.  As the platform grew and we began to realize the full potential of Authorea we realized how limited our goals would be if we only helped LaTeX and Markdown authors. Indeed, even if all the LaTeX writers in the world were writing with us, that would only represent a small fraction of researchers. We wanted to make research more robust, data-driven, and open for all researchers. We came to the conclusion to totally rewrite our editor, to make it accessible to researchers in humanities, life sciences, social sciences, as well as in math, physics, and engineering.  It's a hard problem to build an editor that accommodates such a diversity of writers but with the continuing increase in cross-discipline collaboration \cite{Luke_2014,Dhand_2016} we felt it a worthwhile problem.

Today, we're happy to announce the release of a new and improved ability to track changes on Authorea.  Based on git, the most sophisticated version control system available today, researchers using Authorea can now see word by word edits from co-authors or a per-day summary of changes made.  Because the version control system is built into the document creation process and not simply added on, like track changes used in Word or Google Docs, the full life cycle of a paper will be available. Such functionality will make collaborating and editing even easier amongst researchers on Authorea, accelerating the time it takes to report your findings and saving your inbox from the deluge of emails with different versions of the same paper that is typical of collaboration in other editors, like Word.

Research is really f**king important.  This statement is almost self-evident by the fact that you're reading this online.  From research has come the web, life-saving vaccines, pasteurization, and countless other advancements. In other words, you can look at cat gifs all day because of research, you're alive because of research, and you can safely add milk to your coffee or tea without contracting some disease, because of research. But how research is done today is being stymied by how it is being communicated.  Most research is locked behind expensive paywalls \cite{Bj_rk_2010}, is not communicated to the public or scientific community until months or years after the experiments are done \cite{trickydoi}, is biased in how it is reported - only "positive" results are typically published \cite{Ahmed_2012}, does not supply the underlying data to major studies \cite{Alsheikh_Ali_2011}, and has been found to be irreproducible at alarming rates \cite{Begley_2012}.Why is science communication so broken?Many would blame the fault of old profit-hungry publishers, like Elsevier, and in many respects, that blame is deserved. However, here's a different hypothesis: what is holding us back from a real shift in the research communication industry is not Elsevier, it's Microsoft Word. Yes, Word, the same application that introduced us to Clippy is the real impediment to effective communication in research.Today, researchers are judged by their publications, both in terms of quantity and prestige.  Accordingly, researchers write up their documents and send them to the most prestigious journals they think they can publish in.  The journals, owned by large multinational corporations, charge researchers to publish their work and then again charge institutions to subscribe to the content. Such subscriptions can run into the many millions of dollars per year per institution \cite{Lawson_2015} with individual access costing $30-60 per article.The system and process for publishing and disseminating research is inimical to scientific advancement and accordingly Open Access and Open Science movements have made big steps towards improving how research is disseminated. Recently, Germany, Peru, and Taiwan have boycotted subscriptions to Elsevier \cite{Schiermeier_2016} and an ongoing boycott to publish or review for certain publishers has accumulated the signatures of 16,493 researchers and counting.  New developments such as Sci-hub, have helped to make research accessible, albeit illegally.  While regarded as a victory by many, the Sci-hub approach is not the solution that researchers are hoping for as it is built on an illegal system of exchanging copyrighted content and bypassing publisher paywalls \cite{Priego}.  The most interesting technologist view of the matter is that the real culprit for keeping science closed isn't actually the oligopoly of publishers \cite{Larivi_re_2015}-- after all, they're for-profit companies trying to run businesses and they're entitled to do any legal thing that helps them deliver value to shareholders. We suggest that a concrete solution for true open access is already out there and it's 100% legal.What is the best solution to truly and legally open access to research?The solution is publishing preprints -- the last version of a paper that belongs to an author before it is submitted to a journal for peer review. Unlike other industries (e.g. literature, music, film, etc.), in research, the preprint version copyright is legally held by the author, even after publication of the work in a journal.Pre-prints are rapidly gaining adoption in the scientific community, with a couple of preprint servers (e.g. arXiv which is run by Cornell University and is primarily for physics papers, and bioRxiv which is similarly for biology papers) receiving thousands of preprints per month.Some of the multinationals are responding with threats against authors not to publish (or post) preprints. However they are being met with fierce opposition from the scientific community, and the tide seems to be turning. Multinationals are now under immense pressure not just from authors in the scientific community, but increasingly from the sources of public and private funding for the actual research. Some organizations are even mandating preprints as a condition of funding. But what is holding back preprints and in general a better way for Authors to have more control of their research?We think the inability for scientists to independently produce and disseminate their work is a major impediment and at the heart of that of that problem is how scientists write. How can Microsoft Word harm scientific communication?Whereas other industries, like the music industry, have been radically transformed and accelerated by providing creators with powerful tools like Youtube, there is no parallel in research.  Researchers are reliant upon publishers to get their ideas out and because of this, they are forced into an antiquated system that has remained largely stagnant since it's inception over 350 years ago.Whereas a minority of researchers in math-heavy disciplines write using typesetting formats like LaTeX, the large majority of researchers (~82%) write their documents in Microsoft Word \cite{brischoux2009don}. Word is easy to use for basic editing but is essentially incompatible with online publishing. Word was created for the personal computer: offline, single-author use. Also, it was not built with scientific research in mind - as such, it lacks support for complex objects like tables and math, data, and code. All in all, Word is extraordinarily feature-poor compared to what we can accomplish today with an online collaborative platform. Because publishers have traditionally accepted manuscripts formatted in Word, and because they consistently fail to truly innovate from a technological standpoint, millions of researchers find themselves using Word. In turn, the research they publish is non-discoverable on the web, data-less, non-actionable, not reusable and, most likely, behind a paywall.  What does the scientific communication ecosystem of the future look like?What is needed is a web-first solution. Research articles should be available on distinct web pages, Wikipedia style. Real data should live underneath the tables and figures. Research needs to finally be machine readable (instead of just tagged with keywords) so that it may be found and processed by search engines and machines. Modern research also deserves to have rich media enhancement -- visualizations, videos, and other forms of rich data in the document itself.All told, researchers need to be able to disseminate their ideas in a web first world, while playing the "Journal game" as long as it exists. Our particular dream (www.authorea.com) is to construct a democratic platform for scientific research -- a vast organizational space for scientists to read and contribute cutting edge science. There is a new class of startups out there doing similar things with the research cycle, and we feel like there is a real and urgent demand for solutions right now in research.

Welcome to the peer-sharing community for scientific samples. Completing the sample description template will take you just 25-30 minutes based on the data in your lab notebook.Optional information is indicated with the words "optional information".Clarifications are marked with a / slash before and after the brief expDon’t hesitate to drop us a message (submit@sampleofscience.com) if you find anything unclear in this template.The sample description is organized to cover the following information.Author information Bibliographical informationSample informationDissemination informationReferences, Figures and AcknowledgementsOkay, let's get started!1. Author InformationCorresponding sample author/provider name--> Enter text here: Corresponding author/provider affiliation--> Enter text here: Corresponding author/provider email--> Enter text here: 2nd sample author name--> Enter text here: 2nd sample author affiliation--> Enter text here:  3rd sample author name--> Enter text here: 3rd sample author affiliation--> Enter text here:  4th sample author name--> Enter text here: 4th sample author name--> Enter text here:  2. Bibliographical informationSample title/ Choose a title that emphasizes the nature and main features of your sample. For example, “Nanocrystalline silicon oxynitride thin film forphotovoltaic application”. /--> Enter text here: Keywords/ Mention keywords so that other scientists can find your sample more easily. /--> Enter text here: Open access license for published sample description/ Indicate under which open access license you wish to publish your sample description. (Note that the physical sample will be shared according to your preferred Material Transfer Agreement.) Please choose one option./     CC BY     CC BY-NC-SAOriginal research article / Specify your original research article that first mentioned your sample, so adopters can reference both your sample description and youroriginal research article. You can use the DOI or a traditional reference. /--> Enter text here: 3. Sample InformationAbstract/ The abstract should indicate the nature of the sample; provide information on its main properties, and describe why it may be useful to other scientists. The first lines of the abstract are used as a compact display of the sample description. /--> Enter text here: Introduction--> Enter text here, optional information:Sample Preparation Method--> Enter text here: Sample Properties--> Enter text here: Practical details--> Enter text here, optional information:Importance of this sample for further scientific achievements--> Enter text here: 4. Dissemination ConditionsNumber of available physical samples/ Mark number of available samples. Please choose one option./     1     2     3     4     5+Location (city, country) of sample--> Enter text here:Internal storage number of sample/ Documenting your internal storage number helps you finding the sample quickly when requested by other researchers. Your internal storage number will not be included in the published version of the description. /--> Enter text here:Sample return conditions/ How should the adopter proceed with your sample after experiments are completed. Please choose one option. /    Sample may be kept by adopter    Sample must be returned to providerInstruction for Use/ Is there specific instruction which the adopter should be aware of before using the sample (e.g. “For wet chemical analysis chips have to be prepared by turning or milling of the sample surface.)? /--> Enter text here, optional informationMaterial Transfer Agreement (MTA)/ You can either apply your own Material Transfer Agreement under which you want to disseminate your sample, or choose the propose Science Common Material Transfer Agreement. Please choose one option. /    Science Common MTA Open Use 2.0    Custom Material Transfer Agreement5. References, Figures and AcknowledgementsReferences/ Enter references related to the creation of this sample using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the reference(recommended) or manually mentioning the author's names, the journal/book volume and page as well as the publication year. We'll do the final formatting for you! /--> Enter text here:  Figures & figure captions/ At least one figure is required in order to publish a sample description. Please add the figure number and caption here. /--> Enter text here: Grant number/ Grant number of funder of the research project the sample belongs to. / --> Enter text here, optional information:Acknowledgements--> Enter text here, optional information:Notes/ Use this field to convey any additional information useful for other researchers, e.g.: “This sample was presented at E-MRS Fall Meeting 2016 at Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland.”/--> Enter text here, optional information:Congratulations!You just completed your sample description.Please export this document as .docx and send your files to our editorial office at submit@sampleofscience.com. Your sample description will be reviewed and assigned with a permanent identifier  DOI within 3 days.

BackgroundJingjing Liang is Assistant Professor of Forest Ecology at West Virginia University. He is Coordinator of the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative (GFBI), an international, multi-stakeholder team of foresters and forest scientists supporting cutting-edge research and policy making in forest sciences and related areas.Jingjing is also the lead author of GFBI's first major scientific paper: Positive biodiversity-productivity relationship predominant in global forests \cite{Liang_2016}. The paper, which was written collaboratively in Authorea by a team of over eighty researchers, was published in the the Oct. 14, 2016 issue of Science.InterviewAuthorea: Congratulations on publishing in Science! How long has this paper been in the works?Jingjing Liang: We started the data compilation and analysis in October 2015, and completed the first draft in May, 2016. That being said, our data collection work started a few years ago.Authorea: Your team analyzed a forest inventory of more than 777,000 sample plots in 44 countries containing more than 30 million trees, making this one of the first attempts to gain a global perspective on the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem productivity. Can you contextualize this accomplishment for us?Jingjing Liang: Sure, forest inventory data are among the most expensive data to collect on this planet, because 1) it takes skilled and experienced foresters to do the work, and 2) the transportation and related logistics to and from the sites make an inventory trip very costly. According to my rough estimate, measuring 100 plots in remote areas cost $50,000 per year, so, the measurement of all the GFBI plots alone would cost US$400,000,000. GFBI plot data consist one of the largest ground-sourced data set in the world, and would be valuable in many applications from policy making to research support.Authorea: You argue that the worldwide productivity of forests decreases at an accelerating rate with the loss of biodiversity -- does this mean essentially that it's less costly to preserve biodiversity than it is not to?Jingjing Liang: Yes, also because we have shown in the article that conserving biodiversity can lead to potential forestry dividends that would far exceed the annual cost of effective biodiversity conservation worldwide.Authorea: What do you see for the future of biodiversity-productivity relationship (BPR) analyses?Jingjing Liang: BPR analyses would thrive in two fronts- big data and controlled experiments. The big data approach addresses the observed patterns in natural ecosystems, whereas the experiments addresses the mechanisms behind the foregoing patterns.Authorea: Your paper contained 84 authors in total. How did you coordinate the writing and work with such a large group? Were there advantages and disadvantages to such a collaboration that you faced?Jingjing Liang: It is very challenging and takes lots of patience and respect to others. It  is difficult to please everyone, or anyone in that matter, but science takes collaboration, and collaboration takes mutual respect, compromise, and even sacrifice.Authorea: Was there a key reason why you decided to write your article on Authorea?  What were some of the features you liked?Jingjing Liang: We needed a platform that facilitates manuscript development by a large group. Authorea proves to be the platform that we need. It is easy to register and easy to use. The only thing I would recommend is to set the default of "email each comment to everyone" option to "email none", for a large-group collaboration.For more information on the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative, please visit: http://www.gfbinitiative.org/research

A new eraFall marks a new era for Authorea. Summer was already very eventful -- 8,200+ custom journal templates, increased rendering speed, dictionary support for new languages, improved article metadata, better import and export functionality, and many more improvements (see our product roadmap). Fall is going to be even more eventful! We are launching a modern design and an improved rich-text editor! Our editor "rewrite" marks the culmination of months of work and it is the biggest project we've undertaken since founding Authorea. We hope you'll like it.We'll be rolling out the new Editor to all our users over the next few weeks after our private beta test. You'll get a message very soon with a link to opt-in. There is a chance that the Beta Editor is already active for your account. Want to turn it on? Go to your User Settings, then click Editor Preferences and if available, select your Default Editor to be Beta. Every new article you will create from the top navbar (Create New) will be in Authorea Beta.Here are some of the updates we think you’ll find exciting:A modern new lookIt took a long time but we finally have a dashing new look: familiar and easy to use like most modern word processors, and at the same time perfectly tailored for the writing needs of researchers. And this is just the beginning. We will continue improving your reading and writing experience.

"Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky". E.B. White The New Yorker, July 26, 1969Where does the Moon come from?Scientist believe that our Moon formed out of a ‘giant impact’ that occurred between a Mars-sized planet and the early Earth, some 4.5 billion years ago. The Moon was then formed from the coalescence of the orbiting debris scattered during the impact.Recent results seem to confirm this scenario

Scholarly publishing is hard, really hard.  Researchers submit their manuscripts to journal after journal after journal in hopes of publishing their work in the most prestigious outlet. Because of how long and strenuous the publishing process is it's been compared to birth, a battlefield, and a lottery.  Individual student publishing at the graduate or undergraduate level is nearly unheard of--we'd like to change that.

Stellar ultrasounds. Certain stars pulsate and can effectively be considered huge musical instruments: depending on their size and internal structure, they can oscillate at different frequencies, somewhat similar to spherical drums of different size, shape and material. The waves that propagate through the star can bring to surface precious information about the internal regions they crossed. This is similar to what seismologists do with the planet: they study at the surface waves excited by earthquakes to retrieve information about the structure and properties of the Earth’s inner regions they crossed. The waves crossing a star can be of different types, some are similar to sound waves, others to surf waves. Different waves probe different regions of the stellar plasma, so depending on which type of waves astronomers 'listen to', they can retrieve properties relative to different stellar depth. This is the basic idea behind the 'stellar ultrasound'. It turns out that the oscillations induced by these different types of waves can be encoded directly in the light of the star. This is awesome, because the sound can not travel in the vacuum that is the medium between stars, but light can. Also it travels much faster. This opens up a new branch of astronomy called "Asteroseismology", something only recently we started applying to large collections of stars because it requires observations from space. We can now determine the internal properties of thousands of stars. Some of these stars are thousands of light years away! And we found many surprises. The latest discovery is the potential ubiquity of ultra-strong magnetic fields hiding in the stellar cores. The stellar core is the region where thermonuclear reactions are at play, making the star shine and basically creating all the elements of which humans are made off as a byproduct (except Hydrogen). These magnetic fields are million of times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, and can change completely the way a star lives and dies! For example, they might be playing a role in producing the brightest explosions in the cosmos...  Stars are huge musical instruments, playing music with their starlight. This twinkling carries the secret story of their magnetic coresSource: - Science (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6259/423.abstract), - Nature (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7586/full/nature16171.html)

BROOKLYN, NY, NOVEMBER 10, 2016 --Authorea (http://www.authorea.com), the online collaborative platform for researchers, today announced it has acquired The Winnower (https://www.thewinnower.com), a pioneering research publisher that offers advanced publishing tools to individual authors.With the acquisition, Authorea enhances the foremost online platform for researchers to write, cite, collaborate, host data, and publish all in one place. The acquisition follows a financing round led by Lux Capital and joined by Bloomberg Beta, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, TechHammer, ff Venture Capital, and New York Angels."We are building a powerful toolset for researchers to collaborate," said Authorea CEO Dr. Alberto Pepe. “We're supporting a research model that puts the author first, allowing him or her to write technical research documents online -- with a data layer underneath -- and to control fully the output and dissemination of that effort. We're pleased to welcome aboard the team at The Winnower, which will help provide additional publishing options to our researchers."The Winnower, founded by Dr. Joshua Nicholson in 2014, is a leading publisher of preprints and grey literature -- outputs that are often overlooked by traditional publishers."The Winnower offers traditional research publishing tools, such as a digital object identifier and permanent archival, to non-traditional documents like Reddit r/science Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) transcripts, blog posts, preprints, grant applications, citizen science reports, and more," said Dr. Nicholson. "We're delighted to join the forward-thinking team at Authorea. We share the mission of accelerating scientific discovery through superior research communication tools, and a big part of that is providing authors the tools to control their research from initial spark to output."##

The scientific community holds elections for various academies, positions, and prizes. Much like in politics, the elections have not always been open to everyone. Here we highlight 8 "firsts" in elections in light of the current United States presidential election.