The goal of this project is to develop a "work in preparation" (PREP) editor, a multi-user environment to support a variety of collaborative and, and in particular, co-authoring and commenting relationships for scholarly communication. The editor is designed to facilitate the intensive study of co-authoring and commenting relationships across local and remote electronic networks. The PI's focus on scholarly communities because they are already collaborative work groups. They are not explicitly organized around single, concrete goals, but members of groups share the common goal of advancing the state of knowledge. Such work groups are organized in local settings, but they also interact intensively at a distance, as members of a common "invisible college." Enhancing the effectiveness of this loosely-coupled collaboration is an important function for the tools developed under this research. The project has scientific significance in computer science, psychology, and organizational communication. In communication and organizational psychology, the project contributes to the further refinement and test of a collaborative model of how groups usefully interact when working together as co-authors and commenters. In computer science, the project provides a proof of concept test for editing systems that support structured collaboration among authors as well as the efficient management of large volumes of comments that external commenters can make of authors; working drafts.
