Green Tea and Velociraptors

Our mission at paleorXiv is to make the open sharing of paleontological research as simple as possible for researchers. We’ve published 65 articles already, and one of the most common pieces of feedback we get is how easy the process is, often only taking a few minutes. For the typical submission process, all you need are:

1. The file you want to share (preprint or accepted manuscript, PDF or text),
2. The final published DOI (where applicable),
3. The article abstract,
4. The article keywords,
5. The names and emails addresses of your co-authors.

That’s it! Click submit, and then we’ll check it for journal compliance and it’ll be immediately made available online if it is. Free for authors, free for readers, thanks to the Center for Open Science. If you’re sharing a preprint, there’s nothing stopping you from sending it on to a traditional journal.

Collaborative writing and publishing made simple

Now, we’ve made this sharing process even easier. The folks at Overleaf, a collaborative writing platform, have created a new template for direct submissions to paleorXiv, using a consistent format. You can open it directly as a template in Overleaf, or download as a PDF and work from there.

If you choose to use the template in Overleaf, you can then write and edit your paper in either rich text or latex format – all online, so you can work in real time with your colleagues! The final paper is automatically rendered live as you work so you can see the finished product.

After you’ve finished, simply click ‘Journals and Services’, scroll to paleorXiv, and click submit. You’ll get all the source files as a zip file, and the final paper as a PDF, and then taken to the usual submission portal.

After this, if you want, you can add all the raw files (data, code, images, tables) to the article as an OSF project. Simply scroll to the bottom of the article page, and it’s right there. You have unlimited storage space, and can connect to other services like GitHub and Figshare too.

Sharing your research outputs has never been this easy.