hi. I'm Don Samac, president of US operations of Editage Caus Communications, and I'm here in London in the UK at the McMillan Science and Education building in the Digital Science offices, talking with John Hamersley, co-founder and CEO of Overleaf. You see yourself as an entrepreneur, as a business person, but who is heavily entrenched in the publishing community and the research community, bridging between the two. What is your vision of what the future of publishing is going to evolve into? So, I think it's really interesting, and I think it's a really exciting time to be part of it. And this is one of the reasons we founded Overleaf, was because we felt it was the perfect time to be part of and to help contribute to the growing rise of reproducibility and openness in science, and just generally the growing rise in interdisciplinary collaborations. So, I hear it all the time, and I see it through examples that people use Overleaf for is um, you may have

mathematicians working with biologists or economists or physicists working with chemists writing and producing different papers and combining the expertise in different fields. I think through advances in technology, science is becoming more interdisciplinary. You suddenly have biologists now working with computer scientists in a really growing field of computational biology. It makes perfect sense to have tools that complement and let you work with large data sets, let you work collaboratively on papers between people with very different backgrounds and very different writing habits and experiences. Rather than the output from research just being one static paper, you can also combine that with all the data that went alongside that. You can have it so it's more of a conversation, and you can include comments and reviews. I really like what's being done towards open peer review. I see that science and research is becoming more open with the mandates from governments that publicly funded research should be open. I see it becoming more reproducible.

and more transparent with the inclusion of the data behind the paper and the um and making it easier and making it and encouraging people to reproduce work and test and validate different conclusions. So, what are the limitations where the communities are publishing in an open access point of view or open collaboration point of view? What are the glass ceilings that you perceive right now that we need to break through? So, I think a lot of this has to be tied to how the academic career progression works. So, I think challenges in the past have been that um everything was tied very much to citation record and publication record, but we're now seeing movements away from that, movements towards recognizing other sorts of Publications and other sorts of measures of success, if you like, or measures of impact of a paper. And we're also starting to recognize, and I think there's a growing recognition for the fact that different people contribute different things um to a paper. So, some people might produce the data that goes into the paper, someone might write up the research, and and other

people might be conducting the experiments, and I think we're starting to see more recognition for these different types of contributions. But until it's really tied in with how things are funded, I think that that's the big challenge. The mandates on public-funded research being Open Access is encouraging because it's helping to, you know, say that, you know, we believe that that research should be open and that we believe it should be, you know, then collaborative and absorbed, able to be absorbed by the community and not hidden away, um, within silos and within, you know, only accessible by people at institutions with subscription access to those. I'm guilty. I wrote three papers during my PhD, which got published. The data sets that I used, the computational programs that I wrote to analyze that data, that's just sat on my computer, and there was no incentive for me to make it open. In 10 to 20 years, we will start to see that actually if you have provided a

data set which has gone on to be analyzed by lots of different people. You should hopefully be able to get funding to continue to produce data sets. What I perceive one of the major limitations in the research community is just out and out their conservativeness in not willing to change, not wanting to change, and that's being broken somewhat by the youthful generation who grew up digital and think digital. For me, the research community glass ceiling is the willingness to reach out and just simply use Overleaf and use other platforms. I think we have to recognize that different people have different problems, and people at different stages of their research career have different problems and different challenges. And you know, as someone who's a senior lecturer, probably their biggest challenge is time. You know, they don't have time to do a lot of things and necessarily embrace new tools. And I think there's some responsibility there on us, the providers of tools, and the communities that build them to make

them accessible to different people and recognize that people use them in different ways. I mean, a good example for Overleaf was that we, but sometimes we would get some feedback from an author, student author, that said it was great. I really enjoyed writing it. It was really easy, but now I've sent it off to my supervisors, asked for a Word version because he wants to use track changes and comments in Word because that's the best way for him to do it. We took that on board, and one of the things we've recently done is launch track changes, you know, in Easy track changes mode, and a commenting feature so that people who want to leave quick comments now can do so. We've had a lot of feedback from users, so 200,000 users provide us with a huge spectrum of inputs and suggestions for what to do next, and we try to listen to that. Let me ask about your personal, um, I know everything I do, I do by passion.

and my motivation is a passion to make a difference in the world. What motivates you to keep making this change, to keep doing what you do? I think you summed it up really well in wanting to make a difference. You know, I mean, that's kind of been behind everything that I've done. We started over Leaf because we recognized it was actually making a big difference to how people write their papers. And you know, I've heard it said, this isn't an original quote for me, but every half an hour you save a researcher from doing admin tasks, you know, it's half an hour for them to help save the world. That's great. Again, as an ex-researcher, one of the real barriers was getting thoughts down on paper. And if there are collaborative tools that reduce the inhibitions of getting started because you start up a collaborative tool, maybe the other person gets you started, and that accelerates research. And anything that can be done to accelerate research, you mentioned saving research or time, but that

translates into accelerating research. Yeah, I mean, I love this example. So, um, three researchers doing mathematical models of cancer tumors. Um, they got together for a bit of a hackathon, and one was David, who was based out in the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida. Another was Artam, who's based in Montreal. Um, and another one is Jacob, who's based in the Oxford Center for Mathematical Biology. Um, they got together, and they were working up some ideas for these mathematical models, and then in four days, they'd written a paper on Overleaf and had been able to publish it to the archive, where it's then available for other people. And I like to think that, you know, rather than no, rather than ideas, you know, taking a long time to come out and maybe being sort of siloed, and they can be more accessible more quickly. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. I never thought of Overleaf or collaborative writing tools as a weekend exercise, you know, Let's just

jump on overlap this weekend, see what we can bang out as a research paper. Uh, that, that, that's classic. I mean, that, that can actually change the way uh reviews are done or other things are done. I, I tip my hat to Overleaf to potentially opening up a whole new way of working. It's not just a tool, it's a whole new environment and a whole new outlook on how to produce research and how to, how to publish, not just what to publish. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a hugely exciting time. We're, you know, we're, we're growing, we're growing rapidly, and we're, we're looking forward to the future. I mean, there's lots of exciting things to come and that we're already working on, and there's probably a lot of other exciting things to come that we haven't even thought of yet, but that's, that's what it's all about. So, it's been a pleasure talking with you today again. It's Don Samac, president, US operations of Editage Cactus.

Communications currently sitting today in London, UK, at the digital science offices of McMillan publishing, talking with John Hamersley, co-founder and CEO of Overla. Thank you, John. Thank you. [Music] John.

Overleaf – 과학 발전의 키워드; open, reproducible and collaborative

Overleaf – 과학 발전의 키워드; open, reproducible and collaborative

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