The power of Git 💪
Git is a powerful version control system for collaboration on documents. Arguably, the most powerful system there is. It's also confusing to most people as evidenced by the fact that
"Git for Humans" is an actual book and the name of
a popular talk online. Indeed, as soon as you start saying words like, "branch, head, push, and pull," most researchers are lost and will sadly never take the time to learn. "Git's for software developers!" they may say; or "Why should I learn about this... publishers don't care!" Git's learning curve is steep and it keeps many away from it, which limits its potential. We have adopted and repurposed Git at Authorea, so that it can be used and utilized across a spectrum of expertise and, importantly, by all researchers. Indeed,
many researchers currently writing on Authorea might not even know that articles on Authorea are git repositories themselves. Let's see what a Git backend allows you to do.
Version control, or "track changes"
Authorea writers automatically take advantage of git with our
"history view" feature, a feature that is built into the writing process itself. Git automatically
tracks all changes that happen in a document so that you can see
who did what, or answer the question: "
how has my document changed since the last time I saw it?". There are also researchers that use Authorea exclusively because we are compatible with an
advanced git workflow and have an easy interface for researchers not comfortable with git.
Achintya Rao of CERN writes about why he uses Authorea:
I can work with individual files for individual chapters/sections and have their full history stored in git. When I need feedback from my supervision team, I simply use Authorea’s web-based frontend to export the document to Word and circulate it for comments.
Hosting data behind figures
Because Authorea articles are git repositories data can be directly uploaded within a scholarly article - inside the document - as seen in the Figure \ref{240631} (see what we did there?). Why is this important? Sharing original data - the data behind your published figures - is fundamental to make your research more open, transparent, reproducible. Even more, sharing the data relative to a paper makes your paper more visible, more discoverable and thus more likely to be cited.