What is the ArXiv?The arXiv, or actually, ar\(\chi\)iv (pronounced "archive", since \(\chi\) = "chi" 🤓 ) is the most popular preprint repository in the world. (Read: What is a preprint?) It was started in 1991 by physicist Paul Ginsparg (hi Paul! 👋 ) to become a way to quickly and freely give the scientific community access to the submission-ready research papers, as e-prints. While the arXiv initially covered only the fields of physics and astronomy, it grew over time to encompass other fields, such as computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance. The rise of arXiv has been mostly limited to fields that use LaTeX, a typesetting system for math-heavy documents. This is because: (1) the most efficient way to submit papers to arXiv is by uploading a LaTeX file which gets compiled to PDF, and (2) pre-printing has historically been a practice popular in the hard sciences --- at CERN, it was performed via inter-library exchange of scanned papers before the web even existed \cite{pepe2005cern}. However, in recent years, pre-prints are catching on as a free (and legal!) mechanism to openly and quickly share research also in the life sciences (see ASAPbio, and BiorXiv, for example).How do ArXiv and Authorea compare?At first glance, ArXiv and Authorea may not seem related to one another. ArXiv is a content repository, while Authorea is a content creation system. However, Authorea - with the launch of a number of publishing features - is quickly becoming an open repository, as well. We think that the open research repository of the future will have a lot of the features and traits that Authorea is developing. Here's why:1. A scholarly repository is more than a PDF dumpThere is growing consensus in scholarly communication circles that academic publishing needs to move "beyond the PDF" (see the manifesto of Force 11). PDFs are a great portable format for printing, but they are not the best format to share, discuss, and read on the web. Every article on arXiv is a PDF (built from LaTeX). As such, it is static, 2-dimensional and non-actionable. It is not a stretch to say that a paper in PDF is merely a digital photograph of a piece of paper. We can, and are doing, better than that. Authorea's repository is a collection of Open Access and Open Science (i.e. data driven) web native papers.