Economic Principles in Cell Biology

Principles for collaborative writing

Publish regular updates of the book
A (latex) pdf and an HTML version
Pdf version should be posted to repositories like BioRxiv or HAL
We should figure out a simple + cheap print-on-demand option, where readers can get a printed version of the book by just ordering it with a print-on-demand publisher
Contributing should be easy and low effort
Break the topic down into small manageable pieces
If possible, encourage re-use of (authors’ own) texts from the public domain
Responsibilities should be flexible and transparent
An author can be responsible for a part of the book; in this case, they can organise who has write access for that part (only the author, the author and others, anyone?), and are responsible for correct formatting
Alternatively, an author can be a contributor (to all parts of the book to which they are granted writing access); information about writing access needs to be shown clearly and centrally (including whom to ask to get writing access for a specific part of the book)
A clear central to-do list, to show where and how people can contribute
Encourage the use of different online tools (eg overleaf, papeeria, google docs) such that every “responsible” author can decide about the one they find most practical tool to work with
A transparent timeline with known dates for new releases of book versions
The workload should be distributed among many authors
Learn from existing community efforts (such as SBML, COMBINE, etc)
Avoid redundancies by having a clear structure (to be discussed among the authors)
Start with a small, manageable core part of the book, and demonstrate that this can be done; establish good teaching materials just for this core, to encourage others to contribute to an already functioning project
We should explore and further refine procedures that have been used by other communities
Use the most practical available tools and infrastructures, and be flexible (because everyone has different preferences for tools + styles of working)
All central decisions should be taken by the collective, i.e.everyone who currently contributes
The work should be overseen by editors to ensure a consistent style of the book