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Hey, thanks for the comments. It is true that your research lab gave you MS Word for free, but that doesn't mean someone didn't have to pay for it in order to give it to you. I personally don't like the experience of writing articles in Word, but I can totally see how many people would be fine with it, especially if their work is not equation-heavy. I prefer writing in Latex more than Word, but it still isn't a happy experience for me. The errors are nearly useless, I'm constantly compiling and waiting for pdf output, and then I have a static pdf as output, which isn't so exciting. That's why we decided to try and build something different. I want to look at rendered text most of the time during my workflow, but I don't want to use Word. I'd prefer a markup language with a nice-looking, easy to remember, syntax, which is why we offer Markdown. Collaboration should be easy, which is why it's online. I want things to be dynamic, which is why we're working on that. I want to share my data with my figures and my analysis with my data. Again, we're working on that. It is true that in 2013 what is important is publishing in respected peer-reviewed journals. But we're really trying to think about what an article is going to look like in 2023. I highly doubt it is going to be a static pdf (or static html version of said pdf) available only to paying users of a respected journal, or users whose institutions are nice enough to pay for them. I'll be the first to admit that we have a long way to go, but we gotta start somewhere. |