As most papers are collaborative efforts, recent offerings of online collaborative editing by many sites is really exciting. The only issue tends to be that the editors are quite underfeatured for most scientific writing. Sorely missed is the ability to do things like equations or references.

I recently came across this site called MonkeyTeX which allows you to write and collaborate with LaTeX and TeX. All the best of TeX along with the ability to share the document in real time. In my experience, newcomers to TeX aren’t so intimidated by the LaTeX formatting of documents as they are by the initial preamble of the document which can be pretty opaque. Hopefully, if there is a ready made preamble available more writers would be willing to try out TeX.

One thing this site could add is preambles and bibliographic styles for different journals. That way you could start writing right away without trying to find or write the preamble.