Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers

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Citation: Bill Tomlinson, Joel Ross, Paul Andre, Eric Baumer, Donald Patterson, Joseph Corneli, Martin Mahaux, Syavash Nobarany, Marco Lazzari, Birgit Penzenstadler, Andrew Torrance, David Callele, Gary Olson, Six Silberman, Marcus Stünder, Fabio Romancini Palamedi, Albert Ali Salah, Eric Morrill, Xavier Franch, Florian Floyd Mueller, Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Rebecca W. Black, Marisa L. Cohn, Patrick C. Shih, Johanna Brewer, Nitesh Goyal, Pirjo Näkki, Jeff Huang, Nilufar Baghaei, Craig Saper (2012) Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers.
DOI (original publisher): 10.1145/2212776.2212779
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1145/2212776.2212779
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1145/2212776.2212779
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers
Download: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2351392
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Summary

Result of research-through-writing with 31 collaborators. Only topic of paper, publication venue, and a few policies were pre-specified.

Participation took two trajectories, each beginning with a bout of activity. First, activity tapered off or ended. Second, activity persisted through final version. All named collaborators responded they would like to participate in more distributed, collaborative online writing. Mixed response to lack of lead author/control.

Google Docs was initially used, then Etherpad after an error was encountered with former. A collaborator survey was incorporated into the document. Most discussion occurred within the document itself rather than back-channels. Other potential tools were discussed. Desiderata included synchronous editing and robustly seeing who wrote what, latter version control systems may be better for. Sub-tasks could be supported by other tools, eg zotero for references.

Massive collaboration presents challenges to systems tuned for small numbers of contributors, eg, anonymous peer review, data entry, impact measurement, citation formats.

Challenges and strategies:

  • Massive collaboration means lots deleted: know your collaborators, explore roles of management
  • Inadequate tools: explain state of paper/section, explore ways to curate/challenge sections
  • Task and domain differences (eg collaboration on research and/or writing): develop coordination mechanisms (eg paper used email updates in latter stages)

Future work/research:

  • What disciplines and forms of research best suited?
  • Better tools, including pre-collaboration, eg help suitable mass collaborators find each other, determine what papers are being written for a venue, and post-paper, eg summary

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Compare with Writing in Book Sprints for non-research material. Might there still be a common denominator? Facilitation?

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