David PS

List of collaborative tools I’ve used or I’ve heard of. This list will be update regularly as I found new tools. The update date will be added at the end.

If you know of other tools, please, let me know about them and I will add them in here. (Pull requests welcome.)
</br>

Sharing files

• Dropbox
• Google drive
• One Drive, microsoft’s solution.
  </br>

Real-time editing

• Google docs for a full office suite
• etherpad for plain text
  • sandstorm also offers etherdraw, ethercalc,…
  • framasoft has a version of the above (but in French).
• LaTeX or similar editors
  • Overleaf what used to be writelatex. Free up to 1GB.
  • ShareLaTeX, an open source LaTeX editor that can be used on their site or installed in a personal server. Also available as Sandstorm app.
  • \BlueLaTeX, another open source LaTeX editor backed by Mozilla Science Lab. Needs to be installed in server.
  • Authorea, really easy to use editor aimed for researchers to upload papers directly to some journals. You can write comments/discuss on a particular paragraph.
  • Cloud.sagemath, a cloud based environment which has a terminal, file system and more: a full scientific linux box in the cloud (R, Python, LaTeX etc…).
    </br>

Collaborative editing documents

• Wiki software
  • MediaWiki, the software that runs wikipedia.
  • Federal wiki, the revamp of the origin of the wikis. Fancy interface.
• Track changes on office suites
  • Microsoft Office, LibreOffice and others have a track changes capability useful when sharing the same file (eg. through dropbox, shared disk or email).
    </br>

Collaborative editing code

• Version control software
  • git is the one developed by Linus Tovarlds
  • mercurial seems quite easy to learn (I haven’t used it yet).
  • Baazar, subversion (svn), cvs, and many more are available.
• Version control platforms
  • GitHub offers a great way to do code-review.
  • bitbucket
  • GitLab is an open-source github clone. You can install it in your servers.

Version control is great for plain-text, but many use word like documents, or spreadsheet, or Ipython notebooks. Some solutions for that is: - nbdiff is a diff viewer for jupyter-notebooks.
</br>

Pair programming

• MadEye is a real-time code editor that can be used through Google hangouts or independently.
• Codebox to code in the cloud.
• Plugins for GitHub’s text editor atom allows pair-coding
  • AtomPair
  • motepair
• Sense a paid platform for Python, R, Julia and Spark
• DataJoy like the above with a free plan, made by the ShareLaTeX people. Check this example of scikit-image gallery.
• screen sharers/cast; not extrictly collaborative coding but helping others
  • asciinema allows you to record your terminal as text.
  • shellshare broadcasts your terminal.
  • recordit.co record your screen, share as gif or video.
    </br>

Communities

• kune a community environment using what it was once google wave and now kept by apache. It offers blog, wiki, document storage, chat, etc. Also it’s possible to install it in your own server.
• Exo|tribe, the open source version of the Exo platform. Provides forum, calendar, documents, etc.
  </br>

Share research steps

• Open Science Framework a github like interface for your data and experiments. I find it a bit difficult to understand.
• docollab similar to the one above, I’m lost with protocols and plates.
• SubstormZoo an online analysis platform for space weather data analysis includes notebooks and discussion boards with team members.
• myExperiment is a Taverna (and others) online repository. Allowes groups and versioning of the workflows. Also provides metrics of who uses yours. It would be excellent if OnlineHPC is collaborative. For now, e-infrastructures as er-flow or shiwa builds on workflows so researchers can run some of them.
  </br>

Share results as papers

• Zenodo integrates with github and produces doi for your code, but also for other material like data, presentations, posters, lessons, etc. It’s powered and funded by CERN, EU and OpenAIRE.
• figshare is older than zenodo but it’s original moto is share data, negative results too!
  </br>

Sharing References

• Mendeley, started independent but now belongs to Elsevier. It has a social-network system that allowes you to follow researchers and a recommendation system based on your library.
• zotero, independent and open source. You can install it in your servers.
• ADS is for searching, but I’ve heard that it may be possible in the near-future to share
  </br>

Linkedin like for Researchers

• Research Gate
• Academia
• ImpactStory
• Google scholar, with similar profil
• Author labelling
  • OrcID, independent
  • ResearcherID (Thomsom Reuters; Web of Science)
  • Author Identifier (Elsevier; Scopus)
  • SPASE registry (space science)
    </br>

Chating and discussion systems

• Video included
  • google hangout
  • skype
  • webex
  • GoToMeeting
  • jitsi; Open source
  • tux; encrypted
• Text based
  • IRC, the classic, with endless extensions and bots.
  • gitter
  • slack, allows to add people and see history, also to add documents and hook to other systmes.
  • There are software that helps to connect between different chat systems.

jabber accounts: https://xmpp.net/directory.php https://github.com/Docollab/free-scientific-research-web-services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ELN_software_packages also link for pages: http://alternativeto.net/software/speaker-deck/ speaker notes sharing: http://slidedeck.io/ http://slideonline.com/ speakerdeck ethics of the tools/problems zoom.us webconferencing zapier.com connecting apps (automated tasks) http://remotemeetup.com/