Paper Now: Create, edit and display a journal article entirely in GitHub

For people interested in collaboration on papers I strongly recommend Overleaf. It supports both Git and online in-browser editing of the Latex-Source with PDF-preview (which is sometimes a bit slow, but they are working on that).

https://www.overleaf.com

Shameless plug: If you like the service and want to register anyways, you can use my reflink ;-) https://www.overleaf.com/signup?ref=a6702e8ee331

The guys at substance.io have a fantastic editor in a similar vein, but they have been slow on opening it up, due to which it's probably seen a lot less traction than it should.

Here's a random example of what their reader can do: http://lens.elifesciences.org/06351/

The cool thing is they've written a wysiwyg whose data format is json (across browsers).

Git is fantastic for dealing with text and code. Of course this sort of collaborative work would be very powerful with papers, with far reaching implications for our society. (Like the democratization of science.) Someone needs to do analogous things with sound and video, probably using a centralized repository. (I don't know if Soundcloud has that sort of thing now.)

I don't know much about PeerJ but I'm intrigued by their efforts as a publishing company to foster open collaborations like this.

Github social authoring seems to be a thing at the moment. Airpair are doing something similar, and throwing money at it

https://www.airpair.com/100k-writing-competition

For those who are interested

There is significant friction from changing to anything that isn't Word (PDF/Latex to a lesser extent) in this space. I wonder what it is going to take for that monopoly to be broken

Why GitHub Import instead of clonning?