Academic writing workflow

4.1 Guides

• Kieran Healy’s The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science to plain-text academic writing.
• Scott Selisker, A Plain Text Workflow for Academic Writing with Atom
• Boaz Barak’s Theory Life-Hacks
• Shalizi’s Using R Markdown for Class Reports

4.2 Minimally painful LaTeX collaboration

If you need to work with collaborators of different technical expertise levels, across various quirky LaTeX setups, here are some options.

• teletype enables generic live collaborative document editing (atom. No special support for LaTeX.)

• Overleaf (formerly ShareLaTeX) is an open source online collaborative LaTeX editor. They also have a hosted version.

  • Work together on a single version
  • View collaborator edits
  • No complicated LaTeX installation
  • Restore to any older version
  • Access your work from anywhere in the world
  • Work offline and sync your files via Dropbox and GitHub

• papernow is more radical (and more ugly) again.

  Create, edit, and (optionally) display a journal article entirely in GitHub.

  In contrast to the more traditional process of submit > peer review > publish at PeerJ, or even the less formal preprints at PeerJ Preprints or arXiv, Paper Now is an experiment to see where the future may go with scholarly communication. Initially, it may be that co-authors collaborate either privately or publicly on GitHub and then proceed to submitting to PeerJ or other journals for formal peer-review or preprinting. Or perhaps this is where the traditional medium of publication begins to diverge. There is no end goal other than to see what the academic community wants, which is why this is completely open to fork, extend, and build upon.

4.3 Emailing word files between collaborators

You have passed beyond my ability to help you.