This article is an evaluation of an experiment in collaborative group writing of an academic article.
Rather than deciding beforehand who the list of authors would be and then working together to write the article - e.g, by exchanging by email subsequent versions of Word documents with track changes enabled - this experiment opened the writing process to anyone interested in the topic.
This current article is an evaluation of that process, again open to anyone interested in the topic.
The process of writing the original article was structured as a test a number of research questions which are evaluated in this article, namely:
- can a group of writers come together using the GitHub platform to collaboratively author an academic article that is successfully submitted to a journal of the group's choosing?
- can discussions amongst the group members be accommodated within the GitHub framework (i.e., the repo's wiki, issues and pull requests)?
- can the article can be written in under 2 months from the date that it is publicly deployed to the date it is ready for submission to a journal?
- can GitHub's network metrics and the evaluation of the group members be used to determine order of authorship?
- does being listed as an author, in order of contribution, provide sufficient incentive for potential authors to contribute?