Why I'm Building Aris.

August 4, 2025 • Leo Torres

I've spent the last decade in academic research watching how science actually gets done versus how we're expected to share it with the world.

The gap keeps growing. Researchers create interactive visualizations that get flattened into static PDFs. Teams collaborate in real-time on documents, then lose all context when they submit to journals. Knowledge walks out the door when people graduate. And in many fields, a substantial amount of research dissemination happens at the preprint stage, before peer review even begins, yet our publishing infrastructure is still built around the final journal article.

Meanwhile, I've watched colleagues' YouTube explainers reach 100,000 people while their Nature papers get twelve citations. Interactive demos that make complex concepts accessible to undergraduates. These formats often have more real-world impact than traditional papers, but they get no institutional recognition, no preservation, and no connection to the formal research record.

We have the technology to make scientific communication web-native, collaborative, and permanently accessible. We just haven't built the right tools yet.

That's what Aris is for.

Tools for authoring documents that work beautifully on any device. Platforms for hosting research that stays interactive and discoverable. All supported by community donations and academic grants, not optimized for investor exits. Our future vision includes peer review systems that preserve context and credit reviewers properly, and scientific communication tools that curate the complete story of how ideas develop across formats and platforms.

I'm not building this as a quick fix or a side project. A decade in academia taught me that meaningful change in science happens on long timescales. I'll stick it out for the next ten years building tools that will serve the next generation of researchers.

The future of scientific communication should be as dynamic and collaborative as science itself. Join me in replacing publish and perish with:

publish and flourish.