October 30, 2017 – London, UK – Overleaf, creators of the leading online collaborative writing platform for researchers, have a new technology service available for publishers and institutions – the Overleaf LaTeX Validation Service. This new service enables publishers and other third parties to more easily process LaTeX manuscripts for publication, saving time for authors and providing publishers with improved consistency and quality control.
The idea is simple: to address the common cause of problems in the traditional submission process, where a journal or repository cannot reproduce the author’s view of the compiled manuscript due to missing files or mismatched software versions. This typically causes a lot of problems, because from the author’s perspective, everything already looks correct. Overleaf eliminates this issues by providing authors and editors with the same view of the document; that which was compiled and validated using Overleaf.
In this way, the service offers a robust solution to the challenges of managing LaTeX submissions, allowing third parties to use the Overleaf technology and servers to handle all of their LaTeX compilations automatically, via a managed Application Programming Interface (API).
What happens if a file fails to validate? In this case, authors or editors can be provided with a facility to open the LaTeX file on Overleaf, to use the user-friendly interface to quickly find and fix errors in the document, and resubmit through the validation service.
It can save a lot of time and frustration on all sides, especially if authors are travelling and do not have access to a LaTeX installation—for example, when attending a conference or working at another institution. Overleaf co-founder and CEO, John Hammersley, comments:
“We’re excited to offer this new service to our partners by providing integrated access to our highly scalable, field-tested and proven technology. To date over 20 billion LaTeX pages have been typeset using our platforms – a figure which also represents a huge variety in type of content from our diverse mix of users around the world – and we’re happy to be able to extend our technology benefits and experience to the wider authoring and publishing community.”
All services will also include full LaTeX technical support via Overleaf’s current support system and personnel, as well as a metrics and analytics dashboard to provide statistics such as the number of compilations processed each day. Partners can choose to implement the service in a number of ways, and can also work with Overleaf to enhance and customize the service to meet publisher-specific validation and workflow requirements.
You can read more details and find answers about this new service at the Overleaf blog announcement, or please contact maryanne.baynes@overleaf.com with any questions.
About Overleaf – Founded in 2012, Overleaf is a cloud-based LaTeX authoring and document management platform which provides researchers with seamless collaboration and effortless manuscript submission to leading journals. Overleaf integrates with a range of tools and services that form part of many researchers’ everyday workflow—from repository services such as the arXiv, version control systems such as Git through to direct submission into peer review platforms such as Editorial Manager and ScholarOne. Overleaf also connects with a range of bibliography management services including Mendeley, Zotero and citeulike. In addition, Overleaf provides numerous options and services through which users can upload files into their Overleaf projects. Using Overleaf, publishers, societies, universities and other institutions provide an infrastructure capable of supporting teams engaged in multidisciplinary research projects—a communal workspace with which to support and encourage a vibrant national and international community of interdisciplinary research and collaboration.
Supported by Digital Science, Overleaf aims to make science and research faster, more open and more transparent by bringing the whole scientific writing process into one place in the cloud – from idea, to writing, to review, to publication.
Visit www.overleaf.com and follow @overleaf on Twitter.
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