When Fernando Cagua was preparing to write up his findings on the economics of whale-shark tourism, he didn't fire up Microsoft Word. He opened his web browser. Cagua, an ecologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, was keen to try out an online writing environment that would allow him and his three co-authors to work on the same paper simultaneously. Over the past few years, a small cadre of tools have sprung up expressly for this purpose. Although the features vary, each is designed to ease a key difficulty in writing multi-authored research papers: handling collaboration. And some of the creators have wider ambitions -to fundamentally alter the way that scientific papers are written and published.
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