What is Manuscripts.io?

Manuscripts.io is a free, easy-to-use collaborative authoring and workflow management tool. It streamlines the authoring workflow—from outlining to submission.

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Manuscripts.io is purpose-built for STM authoring. It strips out the bulky, unneeded  features of widely used word processing programs and replaces them with specialized features to meet the unique requirements of scientific writing. Its familiar user interface flattens the learning curve. 

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It is available as a native Mac OS desktop app and as a browser-based online platform. Manuscripts.io was developed by an academic to reimagine the disconnected, tedious experience of authoring scholarly research with Word, LaTeX, Google Docs, and other collaboration tools.

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Three high-level messages:

• Collaborative: Don’t let the writing get in the way of your authoring/publishing.

• User-friendly: Manuscripts.io makes scientific writing and publishing easier for researchers. It is simple and intuitive to use. It includes data-related features specific to STM authors while excluding the unneeded features of bulky word processing programs.

• Purpose-built: Developed by researchers for researchers: It gives researchers an authoring environment designed for advancing science imagined by the very people who use the software.

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Pain-point opportunities:

• Spending too much time deciphering a journal’s authoring and submission instructions rather than writing.

• Awkward collaboration and loss of research integrity. 

• Creating and managing data, tables, and figures. 

• Time-consuming revisions, reformatting, and resubmission.

• Error-prone authoring and klugy version control.

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How does Manuscripts.io benefit authors?

Manuscripts gives researchers and practitioners a simplified authoring environment that has been purpose-built for reproducible science and STM publishing. 

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It enables authors to incorporate data and code into their documents and integrates with Jupyter lab notebooks, enriching scientific communication. Its automated formatting, export, and upload tools—including MS Word import and conversion—save time and accelerate the publication cycle. 

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Submission templates let authors quickly format and reformat manuscripts and citations in accordance with each journal’s specifications. And Manuscripts.io’s built-in workflow management tools facilitate real-time collaboration and can be customized to support any authoring workflow.  

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How does Manuscripts benefit publishers?

Manuscripts makes publishing more efficient by automating much of the manuscript conversion, formatting, and submission process. It thereby lowers costs for publishers, accelerates publication, and improves submission quality and author satisfaction. Manuscripts can be used for technical documents, news, blogs, gray literature, and other content types—not just for scholarly journal articles.

 

Functionality for researchers:

• Authoring: Import an existing manuscript from Word, LaTeX, or Markdown, create a new file from scratch, or select from the submission templates of over 1,500 publications. Manuscripts.io gives authors and editors a familiar, easy-to-use word processing interface while also producing JATS XML or publisher-specific markup, PDFs, or any of the document formats it can import.

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• Collaboration: Manuscripts combines real-time collaboration with synced offline editing—in-browser or with the desktop app—and supports annotations and comment threads.

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• Workflow management: Make authoring assignments across a workgroup; assign customizable statuses, access privileges, and deadlines by document section; build a revision trail; and set up alerts delivered on-platform or to third-party systems.

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• Auto-formatting: Easily reformat a manuscript for submission to a different journal; 1,300 predefined submission templates automatically format manuscripts, citations, and bibliographies to any publisher’s specifications. 

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• Submission: One-click submission directly via leading peer review systems.

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• Computational reproducibility: Attach, execute, and interact with the code and data behind research.

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• Multiple content types: Embed math, multipanel figures, video, and audio. The original high-resolution files are tracked and exported along with the manuscript.

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• Citation management: Insert citations from a personal reference library or from online sources—such as Crossref or PubMed—in a project-specific reference library.

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• Copyediting: A special interface for post-submission work enables authoring, copyediting, and proofreading to be handled by the same tool in real-time and in the live document. 

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• Discoverability: Integration with external ontologies and databases allows users to create documents rich in metadata that assists content discovery and dissemination. 

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• Rights management: Track ownership of photography and illustration.

 

Benefits for publishers:

• Publisher-specific submission templates: Publishers can create, manage, and distribute submission templates that enforce their submission and style guidelines.

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• Automated preflight checks: Ensure authors comply with journal-specific formatting, content, and submission requirements prior to manuscript submissions.

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• Automated file conversion: Batch processing to and from multiple document formats.

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• Accelerated publishing: Direct links with peer review systems, preprint servers, and archives, as well as automated HTML conversion, accelerate article distribution. Automated metadata extraction enables editorial resources to be redeployed.

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• Cost-reduction: Built-in custom journal templates reduce publication costs by properly formatting submissions, obviating production-related, post-submission editorial work.

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• Value-added offering: Manuscripts.io is a new tool that publishers can provide to their authors free of charge. 

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• As an open source product, Manuscripts.io offers full visibility into its roadmap, issue tracking, and development process. It is integrated with Atypon’s Literatum content hosting platform. 

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Value to the scholarly community

Manuscripts.io supports Open Science through computational reproducibility. Research literature often lacks exact descriptions of supporting datasets and models, hindering experimental verification. Manuscripts.io’s integration with Project Jupyter’s computational notebooks enables researchers to submit attached interactive figures, datasets, and executable code with their papers.