Paper Now

Create, edit and (optionally) display a journal article, entirely in GitHub.

In contrast to the more traditional process of submit > peer review > publish at PeerJ, or even the less formal preprints at PeerJ Preprints or arXiv, Paper Now is an experiment to see where the future may go with scholarly communication. Initially, it may be that co-authors collaborate either privately or publicly on GitHub and then proceed to submitting to PeerJ or other journals for formal peer-review or preprinting. Or perhaps this is where the traditional medium of publication begins to diverge. There is no end goal other than to see what the academic community wants, which is why this is completely open to fork, extend, and build upon.

Examples

• Searching for anthrax in the New York City subway metagenome
• Collapse of the world's largest herbivores
• Evidence for embodied predictive coding: the anterior insula coordinates cortical processing of tactile deviancy
• Capsules of the diatom Achnanthidium minutissimum arise from fibrillar precursors and foster attachment of bacteria
• Paper Now example article

Instructions

1. Clone this repository to your own account, by visiting GitHub's importer.
2. Edit the article metadata
3. Add data and figures by uploading files to GitHub.
4. Edit each section
5. View your article in GitHub Pages at https://{username}.github.io/paper-now

Notes

• Paper Now is at a very experimental stage; it may progress further if people find it useful.
• Paper Now is inspired by Jekyll Now; the sidebar layout is inspired by Lens.
• If you rename your repository, you also need to change the baseurl setting in _config.yml to match.
• GitHub's desktop client is probably the easiest way to clone a repository, add/edit files and push the changes back to GitHub.
• The article styles and scripts are in a separate web component, so can be updated independently of the article content.

Feedback

• Does this article structure make sense? Would it be better all in one file? Create an issue to discuss it.
• Made changes to the layout templates or some other part of the code? Fork this repository, make your changes, and send a pull request.