- Posted by John on March 18, 2020
Helping you collaborate on Overleaf during the coronavirus pandemic
June 20th Update: At the start of the Coronavirus/COVID19 pandemic, we introduced a temporary free upgrade programme as our immediate response. This programme ran for three months covering April-June 2020, and helped over 45,000 people use Overleaf more effectively during this time. The registration period for this free upgrade has now closed; users who have already taken up the free upgrade will continue to see it applied to their account until the end of June 2020.
To help you to continue to collaborate throughout 2020 and beyond, we are continuing to provide additional support and initiatives. For more information, please see https://www.overleaf.com/events/wfh2020.
May 28th Update: We've extended the WFH2020 free upgrade to run until June 30th 2020. We're also providing specially discounted annual plans to help you continue collaborating throughout 2020. Find out more.
In response to the ongoing developments around the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 pandemic, Overleaf is committed to helping everyone continue to collaborate and work as needed from a remote environment.
As a remote team ourselves, we know how important it is to be able to collaborate effectively, and to assist with this we’re providing free upgrades to Overleaf Professional Accounts for the next two months.
How does this help?
Overleaf is at its heart a collaboration platform. Eight years ago, John Lees-Miller and I were two mathematicians collaborating with others on research into the future of driverless vehicles. We needed an online LaTeX editor to help write our research papers—so we built one, now called Overleaf. In the intervening years Overleaf has grown to serve over five million of you, from students just starting to learn LaTeX, to professional researchers in universities and labs around the world. Our community now faces a new challenge and we have found ourselves in a position to help.
With offices and institutions temporarily closing and increasing the need to work from home, we’re opening up the powerful collaboration features of the Overleaf Professional Account to any user who needs them during this difficult time.
Key additional features of the Professional Account include:
- Unlimited invited collaborators per project;
- Real-time track changes and commenting;
- Full document history;
- Offline syncing via Dropbox, Git, and GitHub.
In short, Overleaf will temporarily provide upgraded Professional Accounts, free of charge, to any person in need of a collaborative, online authoring tool for their work.
The Overleaf platform can be used by students, teachers, researchers and groups to allow collaboration and group work to continue in a remote setting.
How does it work?
To receive your free upgrade to an Overleaf Professional Account simply use this form to provide us with your name and email associated with your current Overleaf account. If you’d like to help us understand how this is supporting your particular institution or field, you can also include your university or organization, department and role, but this is entirely optional.
Upon receiving your request, we'll add you to a dedicated Overleaf Work from Home 2020 group account we've set up, through which you'll receive the upgrade. We will aim to add you to this group within 24-48 hours after you sign up; please bear with us if it’s a little longer over weekends and during busy periods.
We also recommend that you share resources, tips, advice and suggestions with one another via social platforms such as Twitter, to help people who might be working from home for the first time, or otherwise having to find new ways to collaborate due to the impact of the Coronavirus.
At the moment, this free upgrade on Overleaf will expire at the end of May 2020, but we’ll continue to monitor the situation as things develop around the world. Even after the temporary upgrade has expired, you and all of your collaborators will continue to be able to access and work on all of your existing projects without interruption.
The upgrade also won’t affect your existing subscription, if you have one, which will continue to run as normal. For example, if you’re on the Student plan, you can join the Work from Home 2020 group to be upgraded to the Professional Account until the end of May 2020. At that point, when the temporary upgrade expires, you’ll still be on the Student plan.
As a reminder, simply use this form to request an account upgrade. We’ve also put together a short FAQ page with further details, which we’ll continue to keep updated. If you have any questions or require any assistance with your account, please feel free to contact our support team via email (support@overleaf.com) or via our contact form.
With best wishes on behalf of the Overleaf team,
John Hammersley,
Co-founder and CEO, Overleaf