

Before our launch issue finally arrives we have further exciting news to share: Quantum is cooperating with Fermat’s Library, a project enabling collaborative online annotation of scientific papers. Papers published in Quantum will be given the entirely voluntary option to opt-in to this extra free service.

Fermat’s Library is a platform for illuminating academic papers and share knowledge. Our goal is to make papers more open and accessible and to foster discussions around their content. Fermat’s Library was born in 2015 and has since been completely free and open.

While authors write with the best intention of conveying information in the didactically most optimal way, the scientific community is diverse and scientists with different backgrounds can greatly benefit from annotated in depth explanations. In other occasions important implications of seemingly innocuous theorems and lemmas only manifest themselves after publication, rendering literature search tedious as the retrospectively central result seems to be hidden or only implicitly stated. These issues and many more can be remedied by the scientific community collectively scribbling in the margins of important papers (or nowadays implementing hyperlinked TeX comments in the online pdf).

Hence, for all papers published in Quantum there will be the option for authors to enable fellow scientist to scribble into the margins of their works on Fermat’s Library.