| This is an advertisement for Authorea (which I'd never heard of). I extract two passages that stand out to me. > What is the single most important factor that has prevented the arXiv to quickly innovate? We believe it is LaTeX. The same technological advancement that has allowed the arXiv to flourish, is also, incredibly, its most important shortcoming. Indeed, the reliance of the arXiv on LaTeX is the source of all the weaknesses listed below. > The research products hosted by the arXiv are PDFs. A title, abstract, and author list are provided by the authors upon submission as metadata, which is posted alongside the PDF, and is rendered in HTML to aid article discoverability. It's interesting to me that the authors ignore that it is possible to read the source tex for most papers on the arxiv. The arxiv prefers to be given tex and source files, and then to compile and serve the pdf --- when this is done, you can read the source. In this way the arxiv is a repository of both the plain text source of the document and a formatted output. In some of my papers, I deliberately include comments or extra data in the source for others. I'm not alone here; I've used the code embedded in this paper [1], for example. While I think there would be some advantages if the arxiv required all papers to be compilable tex source files, I understand that the arxiv also accepts other formats to not exclude potential writers who do not know tex. [The other formats are pdfs (e.g. converted from Word) or HTML with jpg/png/gif images (which I have never seen in practice)]. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.07827 |