I decided to use the Babylonic confusion between the terms exclosures and enclosures in the ecological literature as a case study to test how easy or difficult it is to write a paper online.
I used Google Docs to write a first draft, and my co-authors edited the same document online.
I then used my online network to look for independent advise, and Bob commented (online) on the manuscript.
We archived our pre-publication manuscript on Nature Precedings where it was already picked up by Google Scholar and Scientific Commons while the manuscript was officially still under review with a journal.
The manuscript was revised (twice, once from Ethiopia), accepted and is now available online from the publisher’s website (DOI).
Writing the manuscript online was nice, but only for the first draft. Google docs was easy to work with, but it has several shortcomings compared to a word processor. There is no thesaurus. Formatting headers and sections of text often results in wrong formats. I didn’t find out how to number manuscript lines. There is no integration with a reference manager – although in theory I could have used my EndNote Web if I wanted. You can’t work on your manuscript if you’re offline. You can’t directly submit from Google Docs to an editorial system – it still involves saving the online document locally, pasting it into a word processor document and submitting it.
It was a good experiment, but I think I’ll stick to the traditional methods for my next paper.
Raf, that is an interesting experiment. I hope that in 5 years this will be the usual way to write and submit a manuscript, until then we can only dream. Integration with a reference manager would be big improvement for Google Docs or other online word processors, I hope that Mendeley, Endnote Web, Refworks or Google Scholar will provide this functionality in the future.
For this kind of writing experiment Lemon8 is another interesting tool to try out.
Hi there, I found this from the Life Scientists room on FriendFeed.
If you install Gears for Firefox, you can indeed edit Google Docs offline.
There is a thesaurus. See https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=107178&hl=en.
I agree that line numbering seems impossible, and it looks like Zotero isn’t at a useful point yet with Google Docs. You can drag in a reference list but the in-text citations aren’t handled.
Thanks for the advise Donald.
I was (some time ago) thrilled when Zotero was announced, but was disappointed soon when I found out there was no way to ‘read’ and process a directory full of directories full of PDFs… The thesaurus and Gears look interesting.
So Raf, overall do you think the paper was improved by doing all this online?
It was useful to see that it is possible, but I am not sure that the end product would have been much different if we would have e-mailed word documents back and forth. The best added value was writing the first draft online. Each author could edit pieces of text, add a sentence here or there or you could just change a single word into a better synonym when it just crossed your mind, and all these changes happened in the same single online document. It could save time and co-authors could reach consensus faster I believe.