Introducing Aris: The publishing platform for the Post-PDF Era.
July 24, 2025 • Aris Team
Academic publishing is broken.
Not in the dramatic, "everything must burn" sense, but in the quiet, everyday frustrations that compound over time. We've all experienced the death by a thousand academic paper-cuts. You've felt it too: squinting at PDFs on your phone, wasting time searching for the correct email thread, watching valuable discussions disappear after conferences end, seeing brilliant research locked away in static files that search engines can barely understand, wincing at the dreaded "data and code available upon request".
We've all adapted to these limitations because, well, this is just how scholarly communication works. But it doesn't have to be.
What We're Building
Aris is infrastructure for the post-PDF era. We're not trying to replace everything overnight, instead we're building bridges from where academic publishing is today to where it needs to be tomorrow.
Our first two tools embody this philosophy:
Scroll Press is a modern preprint server designed for web-native research. Publish from any authoring tool that produces HTML—Typst, Quarto, MyST, Jupyter, or handwritten HTML. Get permanent URLs, version tracking, and community discussions instantly. Press doesn't dictate how you write—it just hosts what you create.
RSM Studio is the reference implementation and collaborative editor for RSM (Readable Science Markup). Write documents that preserve semantic meaning and render beautifully everywhere—from mobile phones to printed pages.
Why This Matters
The current state of academic publishing creates artificial barriers between researchers and their work. Consider the last time you tried to reference a specific figure from a PDF on your phone or tablet, or attempted to trace a citation through multiple documents. These aren't minor inconveniences. They're fundamental friction points that slow down the pace of discovery.
Meanwhile, the rest of the digital world has moved toward interconnected, searchable, accessible content. Social media platforms enable global conversations in real-time. News websites adapt their layouts to any screen size. Even personal blogs have better discovery mechanisms than most academic papers.
But academic publishing remains stuck in 1993, when the PDF was revolutionary for ensuring consistent printing and LaTeX provided unmatched typesetting control. Three decades later, we're still optimizing for paper in a pixel world, treating the web as a poor substitute for print rather than embracing its native capabilities.
Both LaTeX and PDF are just as powerful (in fact, even more powerful) as they were in 1993, to be sure. However, they were both designed to produce or emulate print formats, and it is the reality of many researchers today that they no longer engage with research in print paper.
The tools of knowledge should be as thoughtful as the knowledge itself. LaTeX and PDF realized this aspiration for paper; it is time to build the next generation of tools for pixels.
Our Principles
Everything we build stands on four foundational principles:
Universal: Works on any device, for any user, in any context. No barriers to access, no platform lock-ins. Portable, personalizable, accessible.
This means a document published through Aris' tools is equally readable on any reasonably modern device, with or without assistive technology. It means documents work without internet connectivity and don't require proprietary software or expensive licenses, and are not gatekept behind predatory pay walls. True universality isn't just about compatibility, it's about ensuring knowledge flows freely across all boundaries.
Transparent: Your research, your control. Everything is exportable, versionable, and built on open standards.
When you create something with our tools, you own it completely. Your documents are stored in open formats that any system can read. Every version is preserved with full history. If Aris disappeared tomorrow, your work would remain accessible and portable. We're building tools, not traps. This transparency extends to our code, our standards, and our business model. We aspire to build a community around our tools, and eventually seek ways to enact community governance and oversight.
Interactive: Research is conversation. Our tools enable dialogue, feedback, and knowledge that builds over time.
Static documents kill conversations. Real research happens through questions, challenges, refinements, and collaborative building. Our platforms make it easy to comment on specific exerpts, suggest improvements to methodologies, or build upon existing work via instant author-reader communication. Knowledge should accumulate and evolve, not sit frozen in isolated files. Every publication becomes a starting point for further discovery.
Humane: Beautiful, effortless experiences that respect your time, humanity, and let you focus on what matters.
Good tools disappear into the background, letting your ideas take center stage. No learning curves for basic tasks. No fighting with formatting when you should be writing. No choosing between accessibility and aesthetics. But beyond efficiency, we recognize that researchers are people, not productivity machines. Science doesn't need celebration, but scientists do. We believe that academic tools should be as polished and intuitive as the best consumer software, because researchers deserve interfaces that match the sophistication of their thinking and honor the humanity of their journey.
How We're Building This
Aris is supported by community donations and academic grants—not venture capital equity. This funding model lets us prioritize research community needs over investor returns.
Our governance varies by product:
- Press: Fully community-owned—open source, community contributions, shared governance, forever free
- Studio: Community-maintained reference implementation—open source, bug reports and maintenance contributions accepted
- Forum (launching 2029-2030): Open core model—basic features free and open source forever, premium SaaS (hosting + support) funds development for everyone
We're spending the next few years building community trust. Patient capital beats growth hacking.
A Human-First Approach
Most attempts to modernize academic publishing fall into two camps: either they try to make PDFs slightly better (adding comments, annotations, or viewer improvements), or they create entirely new closed systems that require wholesale adoption.
We're taking a third path: building human-first tools with web standards from the ground up. This means starting with how researchers actually think, work, and collaborate, then building technology that supports those natural workflows rather than forcing you to adapt to the limitations of legacy formats.
The Journey Ahead
We're starting with researchers who are already frustrated with the status quo: those who've tried to make PDFs interactive, who've wished for better collaboration tools, who believe that academic publishing can and should work better in the age of ubiquitous computing. Those who are experimenting with Typst, Quarto, Jupyter Book, Observable, Authorea, Curvenote, Zettlr, Scispace, and even more interactive scientific communication tools such as Manim videos, D3.js visualizations, Plotly interactive figures, p5.js creative coding, insightful TikToks, Discord communities, Clubhouse discussions, and even Twitch streams.
This is just the beginning. Over the coming months, we'll be sharing our thinking on web-native publishing, demonstrating new features, and building in public. We'll explore what it means to preserve knowledge for the long term, how to make research truly accessible, and why the future of academic communication is already here but just not evenly distributed yet.
A Vision Worth Pursuing
Yes, Aris's vision is ambitious and sweeping. It needs to be, for science deserves no less.
We're not just building better tools. We're reimagining how human knowledge is created, shared, and preserved. That's not a small undertaking, and we don't pretend otherwise. But the alternative is accepting that the most important academic discussions of our time will continue to happen in formats optimized for print rather than the digital-first world where most research is now consumed.
Science has always been about pushing boundaries, asking "what if," and refusing to accept that things must stay as they are. Why should the tools of science be any different?
Join Us
The post-PDF era isn't a distant future. It's a choice we can make today. Every time we prioritize accessibility over visual consistency, collaboration over control, open standards over proprietary formats, we're building that future.
If you're ready to move beyond the limitations of print-era thinking, we'd love to have you join us. Try Scroll Press for your next preprint. Experiment with RSM Studio for collaborative writing. Join our Zulip Community to discuss the future of academic publishing. Share your thoughts on what academic publishing should become.
Join Aris in reimagining how researchers create, share, and preserve knowledge with web-native, human-first tools.