The UCI Libraries has licensed some new tools to promote professional writing and collaboration. The latest tool is Overleaf Professional, open to all students, faculty and staff who would like to use a collaborative, online LaTeX editor for their projects. Overleaf Professional accounts provide real-time track changes, unlimited collaborators and full document history. Designed to make the process of writing, editing, and producing your research papers and project reports much quicker for both author and collaborators, Overleaf can also be liked to other services such as bibliographer management software tools to best fit into your workflow. For more information, visit https://www.overleaf.com/edu/uci
Answers to typical questions we anticipate as part of this launch:
1. How users with existing personal accounts can migrate to new campus subscription – with answers to questions about what happens when they leave UCI with their overleaf accounts?
The process for existing users is very simple: Users keep their existing Overleaf accounts and, if they have not done so already, they add their institutional email to the account so that it can be recognized as part of the subscription. Depending on the setup you are pursuing, we either recognize the institutional email by its domain, or have users sign up through SSO. There are several ways that we make it easy for existing users to join the commons subscription - more on this later in January 2020.
There isn't really any account migration required - the accounts stay the same, they are just associated with the subscription to gain access to the premium features that come with the 'professional' account.
When students, staff, or faculty leave UCI, they do not lose access to their Overleaf accounts or the projects they have created, but will revert to the 'free plan.' Under the free plan, they will still have all their projects and be able to continue to participate in any existing collaborations - new projects that they create under the free plan will not have access to the premium features available through the UCI commons subscription. The mechanism by which 'leavers' are recognized varies depending on how institutions handle the email accounts that are provided (or not provided) to alumni and former staff.
2. How to get new users started who are currently unfamiliar with Overleaf but for whom it will help.
Overleaf provides a 'portal page' specific for UCI that includes pointers to LaTeX learning materials and templates, provide marketing and learning materials to help spread the word about the agreement between UCI and Overleaf, can arrange for webinars about the service, and also offer online support to help for those learning to use LaTeX and Overleaf. This will be rolled out later in January 2020.