Overleaf is a collaborative cloud-based

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosper ...

editor used for writing, editing and publishing scientific documents. It partners with a wide range of scientific publishers to provide official journal LaTeX templates, and direct submission links. Overleaf was conceived by John Hammersley and John Lees-Miller, who started developing it in 2011 as WriteLaTeX, through their company WriteLaTeX Limited. Both are mathematicians and were inspired by their own experiences in academia to create a better solution for collaborative scientific writing. They launched a beta version of Overleaf on 16 January 2014, at the first #FuturePub event, held at the British Library in London. After merging with ShareLaTeX in 2017, they released Overleaf v2, combining original features from both into a single cloud-based platform.

History

Overleaf was selected as one of the ten teams who participated to the 2013 Summer's Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV) accelerator programme. That program started on the July 1, 2013, and lasted for 3 months. The Demo Day of that BGV 2013 Summer program was held on the September 19, 2013. The company received strategic investment from Digital Science in 2014. Overleaf won Innovative Internet Business at the 2014 Nominet Internet Awards, and featured 99th in SyndicateRoom's 2018 list of Britain's top 100 fastest-growing business. Overleaf has been discussed as a tool for writing scientific publications in ''Nature'', ''Science'', Red Hat's

opensource.com Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become a ...

and the German IT magazine ''

Heise Online Heise (officially ''Heise Gruppe'', formerly ''Verlag Heinz Heise'') is a German media conglomerate headquartered in Hanover, Lower Saxony. It was founded in 1949 by and is still family-owned. Its core business is directory media as well as gen ...

''. "In 2017, CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, adopted Overleaf as its preferred collaborative authoring platform." Overleaf provides templates for submission to scientific journals and conferences. For example, the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...

and

Springer Springer or springers may refer to: Publishers * Springer Science+Business Media, aka Springer International Publishing, a worldwide publishing group founded in 1842 in Germany formerly known as Springer-Verlag. ** Springer Nature, a multinationa ...

(incl. Nature) mention the possibility for submission using Overleaf.

Merge with ShareLaTeX

On 20 July 2017, Overleaf acquired ShareLaTeX to create a combined community of over two million users. This led to the creation of Overleaf v2, combining original features from both into a single cloud-based platform hosted at overleaf.com. In May 2021, Lees-Miller (Overleaf), Paulo Reis (Overleaf), and Sven Laqua (Digital Science) were awarded the SIGCHI Best Case Study Award at the ACM CHI2021 Conference for their case study "Merging SaaS Products In A User-Centered Way: A Case Study of Overleaf and ShareLaTeX”.

References

{{TeX editors TeX editors Web applications

History

Merge with ShareLaTeX

See also

References