Some researchers are interested in open source, collaborative tools. A great example is the Polymath Project or Polymath1, which resulted in two interesting pa

Some researchers are interested in open source, collaborative tools. A great example is the Polymath Project or Polymath1, which resulted in two interesting papers. This project allowed anyone to join the conversation, and de-emphasized the need for personal credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project This approach is great in that it solves hard problems, which is the real purpose. Unfortunately, it is not much of a career boost, which is a key practical purpose. Anyone can already publish open source papers on github. I tried this out a while ago, and realized the experiment -- to see what contributions were suggested -- wouldn't be useful without any readers (the topic is a bit esoteric): https://github.com/tylerneylon/math https://github.com/tylerneylon/math