I am in academic research. I want to see if this will be good for my work setting. I tried to sign up and got a nginx bad gatewawy error page :(. I'll try again later if I manage to remember.
I got to the create a team name step and got an error page trying to submit the team name. I guess your servers are getting the hug of death from hackernews.
I actually just finished a manuscript with overleaf and published it on biorxiv (shameless plug: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/25/065789.1). Unfortunately, latex isn't used that widely in biological sciences. There is a bit of a learning curve that people just aren't willing to invest time in. During preparation of the manuscript, I had to convert latex to word to distribute to collaborators and then manually edit the latex file accordingly afterwards.
Maybe this type of service where it is more microsoft office based will be better when collaborating with non-computational inclined people.
I've had a similar experience. I'm in a hybrid field (medical physics) where half of the people are from pure physics and the other half from a more biomedical engineering background.
It's pretty funny to see the culture clash between the two when it comes to writing articles. We had to learn latex in our first year of undergrad to write lab reports whereas the biomed people really don't see any value in using latex over word (especially for collaborating).
Authorea is for researchers to write and collaborate online. Multiple users can write across formats in the same document (including LaTeX, markdown, rich text) and you can push a button to export to different file formats, journal styles, or publish to the web.
