You Only Write Thrice – a novel AI tool for scientific writing and publishing

TAILOR researchers Kacper Sokol and Peter Flach have developed a workflow to automatically generate interactive documents, slides and computational notebooks from a collection of markdown source files. The framework offers a novel paradigm in authoring and publishing of scientific outputs.

In academia it is quite common to produce multiple variants of the same content published in different formats: manuscripts, presentations, posters and computational notebooks. The complexity of this source–output multiplicity is compounded even further by the need to track versions, for example to accommodate for the write–review–rebut–revise life cycle of scholarly papers. To abate many downsides of such publishing workflows Kacper and Peter have designed You Only Write Thrice, which enables maintaining a single collection of source documents in a version-controlled environment (such as git) and using this repository to generate a diverse range of output formats popular in academia. To this end, they adapted various open source tools from the Jupyter scientific computing ecosystem and operationalised selected software engineering concepts, offering a proof-of-concept framework that composes Jupyter Book (an online document), Jupyter Notebook (a computational narrative) and reveal.js slides from a single source.

Hosted on GitHub, their approach supports change tracking and versioning, as well as a transparent review process based on the underlying code issue management infrastructure. 

An exhibit of the You Only Write Thrice workflow can be previewed at https://so-cool.github.io/you-only-write-thrice/.