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A cost measure that isn't talked about is effort in collaboration. My partner works in the social sciences and when they write a paper, they send each other wor

by maweki 6y ago

A cost measure that isn't talked about is effort in collaboration. My partner works in the social sciences and when they write a paper, they send each other word documents with annotations and everybody works on it for a few days. While our computer science group writes papers much more in parallel as everybody works in a section and we synchronize our progress via a git repository. I believe Microsoft's Sharepoint could do the same thing, but none of us has Windows and the university does not have a sharepoint license.

errelin 6y ago
Just wondering could Google docs be useful in your case? It’s free plan may already be sufficient for a small group/team
- maweki 6y ago
  In my case, we have to submit LaTeX-sources to journals anyways. In my partner's case, their collaboration workflow heavily relies on annotations and comments. I don't know whether google Docs would work in that case.
  - johnwalkr 6y ago
    Google docs works much better. Real-time collaboration is smooth. Somehow it’s much more performant than using word locally. You can add comments, assign tasks to others (also using comments and +<email address> To tag the assignee). You can also write suggested edits for someone else to approve. Annotations/references and figure numbering are there via plugins. Share point/teams real-time collaboration also works, although not as well, but it has a fatal flaw: it’s too easy to download and work locally, so most users will do this and break the real-time collaboration aspect, without even realizing this was a feature in the first place, falling back on passing around v2_final.docs files that have to be merged. In google docs, you can even use word docs natively now, though a few features are missing. You need a bit of discipline in the team to live with missing this or that tiny formatting detail, again to avoid breaking real-time collaboration.

by maweki 6y ago

errelin 6y ago

Just wondering could Google docs be useful in your case? It’s free plan may already be sufficient for a small group/team

maweki 6y ago
In my case, we have to submit LaTeX-sources to journals anyways. In my partner's case, their collaboration workflow heavily relies on annotations and comments. I don't know whether google Docs would work in that case.
- johnwalkr 6y ago
  Google docs works much better. Real-time collaboration is smooth. Somehow it’s much more performant than using word locally. You can add comments, assign tasks to others (also using comments and +<email address> To tag the assignee). You can also write suggested edits for someone else to approve. Annotations/references and figure numbering are there via plugins. Share point/teams real-time collaboration also works, although not as well, but it has a fatal flaw: it’s too easy to download and work locally, so most users will do this and break the real-time collaboration aspect, without even realizing this was a feature in the first place, falling back on passing around v2_final.docs files that have to be merged. In google docs, you can even use word docs natively now, though a few features are missing. You need a bit of discipline in the team to live with missing this or that tiny formatting detail, again to avoid breaking real-time collaboration.