Authorea

Authorea is a web-based platform for writing, sharing and publishing scholarly research. It began as a collaborative authoring environment that lets scientists, researchers and scholars compose, comment on, track, review and exchange technical documents containing mathematical notation, data, tables, images and bibliographic references. The product has been characterized as a hybrid of Google Docs and GitHub for science, with features including one-click citation and one-click formatting, and support for sharing work at every stage of development rather than only after journal publication.

Over time the platform expanded into a preprint archive allowing researchers to post multi-disciplinary early-view research, and to host branded partner preprint archives such as the Earth Space Science Open Archive (migrated 2022), IEEE's TechRxiv (2023) and Sage Advance (2024). Authorea is aligned with the open science movement and supports open access publishing and free access to research data; preprints on the platform are free to find and view. Following acquisition by Atypon/Wiley, Authorea content was migrated to Wiley's Research Exchange Preprints platform, launched in 2026, with Wiley retaining Authorea as its own preprint archive brand while other partner archives are managed separately. Authors can post preprints to Authorea automatically as part of a submission to a Wiley journal participating in Wiley's Under Review service, and the platform supports direct submission plus editing and re-posting of new preprint versions through its content editor.

Founding story

Co-founders Alberto Pepe, an astrophysicist, and Nathan Jenkins, an experimental physicist from California, met while working at CERN in Geneva, along with scientific adviser Matteo Cantiello. Both founders experienced the inefficiency of exchanging drafts of collaborative research papers by email, formatting them and submitting them to journal after journal, and were frustrated that data-crunching work disappeared once papers were published. After Pepe described the idea, Jenkins learned Ruby on Rails and built a first prototype in roughly three to four weeks. The founders left academic careers to pursue the company. The name derives from the word 'author'.

Business model

Historically a freemium software model: the platform was free to use for anyone creating public, openly hosted content, while users paid through personal accounts or institutional licenses to create private content visible only to themselves and their co-authors, including group, lab and institutional accounts. Since the Wiley acquisition, Authorea operates as a commercial publisher-owned preprint archive where content is free to find and view.

Freemium subscriptions — free for publicly created open-access content, with charges for privacy and additional features via personal accounts and institutional licenses.

Traction

The platform drew tens of thousands of researchers by 2016, particularly in medicine, genomics and computational biology. Preprint volume grew from about 10,000 in 2020 to over 100,000 in 2024. Public browse filters list roughly 19,115 preprints published in a journal, 6,706 accepted for publication and 3,309 under review, with the largest collections being Wiley Open Research (6,273), Clinical Case Reports (3,890) and Ecology and Evolution (1,872). Example early usage includes an Ebola virus research paper posted in spring 2015 that attracted comments and contributions from around 25 scientists before publication in Cell, and a paleoclimatology paper by University of Southern California climate scientists that developed through comments and annotations.

Latest developments

In 2026 Wiley launched its Research Exchange Preprints platform and migrated Authorea and all partner preprint archives to it, retaining Authorea as Wiley's own preprint archive brand while partner archives are managed separately. A notice to authors states that Wiley temporarily suspended direct submissions following the May 2026 migration in order to assess new workflows, improve editorial and integrity screening processes, and upgrade user support.