Title: Using Overleaf for collaborative projects: First impressions and lessons learned
Summary:
using Overleaf and git together for metacomments and version control.
Reference [2], by Satish et al., was still under review when this TUGboat issue went to press. The article has since been published by the Association for Computational Linguistics, and is available.
Full text of article: publicly available now.
Author: Boris Veytsman
Publication: TUGboat volume 41, number 2 (2020), pages 179–181
DOI (this page):
10.47397/tb/41-2/tb128veytsman-overleaf
(previous doi
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Category: Software & Tools
Difficulty: Intermediate
Abstract: The COVID19 pandemic has changed many things. Among them are the ways scientific papers are written. In the past, an author could assume to have physical meetings with the coauthors, to exchange written pages, ideas and thoughts. Unfortunately today these meetings also may mean exchanging virion particles. Thus many collaborations now rely exclusively on virtual meetings. Anybody who has participated in such meetings knows they cannot compare with the lively back and forth of in-person interaction. This puts a heavy burden on the technology involved: we need to compensate for the deficiency of the virtual collaboration with our tools.
In the first months of the pandemic I participated in two completely virtual collaborations, resulting in the papers [1,2]. One paper has seven coauthors, the other has four. The proper organization of the writing process was therefore very important for us.
Overleaf (overleaf.com) was suggested as a collaboration tool. We used it for the papers mentioned above. In this paper I discuss our experience and the lessons learned.
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