Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Don Samulak, President, U.S. Operations of Editage Cactus Communications, and I'm here in London in the UK at the Macmillan Science and Education Building in the Digital Science Offices talking with Jon Hammersley, co-founder and CEO of Overleaf. So Overleaf is not only a collaborative tool, it's not only a collaboration of authors, it's a collaboration of services, it's a collaboration with the publisher, it really is a collaborative tool on many different levels. While that may not have been your vision at the beginning, I'm wondering where you're looking to take that, because I can honestly imagine in certain sectors, mathematics maybe, physics maybe, that peer review is continued in the collaborative environment of Overleaf, and is there a possibility that it becomes a journal platform?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I mean, first of all, yeah, it was originally designed to make it easier for authors to collaborate, and that was kind of the pain that we felt as authors, as scientists. But yeah, once you put a collaborative document in the cloud, which people can access, it naturally opens it up to lots of different services, and it was interesting that you started off with the word community, because actually, a lot of our early integrations were with the LaTeX community, so mathematicians and physicists who write and post to different forums, we provided ways for them to open their examples that they'd given in response to people that had questions, and to open those in Overleaf, so they could collaboratively see the answer and see the example that they'd been working on. So this kind of teacher-student relationship, and we do have a lot of teachers and a lot of students using it at the moment, for the teacher will set out a homework assignment, the students can all open a templated version of that homework assignment, answer the questions, collaborate together if it's a group project, and then submit it through to their lecturer. And so you can then naturally extend that kind of model up into journal publishing, where Overleaf or the publisher provides a template for authors to use, appropriate for the content that's being presented, and the author then writes their paper in Overleaf, they would submit it through to some sort of editorial service, which could then provide checks on consistency and grammar, and that everything was there from a research paper point of view. You could then open it up and pass it through to peer review services, so at the moment you can submit your paper from Overleaf to a lot of journals, but we're also working with some independent peer review services, so you can submit your paper to those services if you want to get an independent peer review. We've also released a commenting platform within Overleaf, which actually people are using for informal review at the moment, again coming back to the student-teacher relationship, the teacher can leave comments within the article that the author can respond to. And I think one of the reasons it's popular is because you're all talking about the article, the comments and the reviews aren't separate, in some separate system where you have to then try and map back what that comment meant, and how that related to the context of the paper. And that can sometimes be quite challenging, it can sometimes be quite challenging to understand what a reviewer meant, if their review is sat on one side and the paper is in another place. So by having those inline comments and having those inline reviews, we're trying to make it easier for everyone basically to have a conversation and collaborate on a paper, and then go on to be published. And you can publish to Overleaf at the moment, so we have a gallery, primarily used for templates and examples, so if you're a teacher you can publish a template for students, or if you've written a particularly nice example of how to draw something in the programme, or how to produce a nice CV, you can submit that as an example. You can also produce articles and submit them, and at the moment we get a lot of students who've maybe completed their coursework or their project report, and that's not something that would necessarily go on to be published in a journal, but they quite like to showcase it and share it with people to whom it's important. So they can publish that to the Overleaf Gallery and they can then share that and it's also retained the link with the paper that was created originally, so if they make any changes at a later date, they can publish a second version very easily and update it. So it's great as kind of a collaborative space which goes from idea through the writing process to review to publication, but publishing in general and publishing in science is a very complicated process. Publishing and the peer review process and finding appropriate peer reviewers is challenging and requires management and requires effort, and that's why we're working with different partners within the publishing industry, because primarily we're the founders of Overleaf for both scientists by background, and we've built a great platform for authors to collaborate on and we're focused on making that the easiest platform to use for writing and collaborating upon papers. There are lots of other people and lots of other companies with a great deal of experience within the publishing space and what's needed and how it works, so we're trying to work with those as far as possible to provide a streamlined experience between the different processes and the different services.

Speaker 1: So many of the things that you said are really quite profound when you think about how the research community is not only getting connected, but the publishing community and all the author support services. For example, at Editage we offer English language editing services, we offer peer review services, we offer a variety of services for authors. We reach out, we collaborate with Overleaf, we collaborate with publishers, publishers collaborate with Overleaf and it's becoming a syncytium of companies that create an environment for research and that's very different than it was before. Overleaf isn't just for researchers, it's for anybody who wants to collaborate on a document can use Overleaf and get their value out of it.

Speaker 2: And it's worth saying it's not just for research papers, it's what people use it for and you can use it for CVs, for posters, presentations, so especially if you've written a research paper, what it's quite easy to do with Overleaf is to take that content and then reformat it and represent it as a presentation or a poster. So you don't have to copy things out and write them out quite as much as you might have to do, might have had to do previously. And yeah, I think generally what it's doing is it's putting the power of professional typesetting into the hands of the general public. With Overleaf you see what the typeset version will look like as you start writing, so you can very quickly and very easily and very intuitively put together a document, see the output and then be happy that you've had an easy way to write the content but you've also got that look and feel that you want at the end.

Speaker 1: So for people who may be listening that aren't in the mathematics, physics, chemistry arena where formulas and the characters are very specific and they can't move around, so Overleaf has created an environment where you are, a typesetting environment is what you see is what you get in the sense that it allows the structure to be put in place and that structure isn't going to be moved as a submission to a journal.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so what it does is it provides an interface for the author which is convenient and useful but on the other side of that you get structured output, so it means that what the publisher gets and what they can use to publish or to typeset formula for example will be exactly what you put in. They don't have to turn it into an image, they don't have to re-key it in and make mistakes potentially. The way you've entered that formula is then translated across exactly to what they can use to publish it.

Speaker 1: So currently in formulas you have Greek characters and a whole bunch of things. Are there language constraints? Can anybody be working in a variety of languages within Overleaf at the current

Speaker 2: moment? Yeah, so Overleaf supports a wide variety of languages and it's all thanks to LaTeX actually. So LaTeX is a piece of software that's been going for about 40 years now and it was created originally for mathematicians or primarily for mathematicians because it provides a really fantastic way for typesetting mathematical formulae really well. But that same precision has then been extended to allow people to write in different languages and with different character sets and obviously Greek letters and the like are very important in mathematics and so it all came out of the same system. But you can load up different packages and we have lots of templates for different languages so that those packages are already pre-selected for you. And then you can start writing in Japanese, in Chinese, in French, Spanish, it handles accents, it handles all the different features and you can write in Hebrew in fact. For example, someone recently posted a Hebrew template to the service. And this is the other thing as well, a lot of these templates are community developed so you don't have to rely on us as a company becoming experts in lots of different languages. The people who are the experts can provide templates which you can then use as a starting point for your

Speaker 1: document. So yes, it's very versatile. That's great. So thanks John, it's been a pleasure talking with you as always. Don Samuelak, President, U.S. Operations and Editech and Cactus Communications here in the Digital Science offices in Macmillan Publishing talking with John Hammersley, co-founder and CEO of Overleaf. Thanks. Thank you.