Chemistry Crowdsourcing Pre-proposal Posted

I posted our pre-proposal to NSF's Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation program on Nature Precedings:

• Bradley, Jean-Claude, Owens, Kevin, and Williams, Antony. Chemistry Crowdsourcing and Open Notebook Science. Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2008.1505.1> (2008)

We used GoogleDocs to write most of the document but near the end I had to switch over to Word to get the formatting right. It is really a shame that GoogleDocs doesn't export properly to Word (or even pdf). There are huge spaces between paragraphs and the images don't come out the same size, which completely messes up the page length. And of course with proposals the formatting has to be perfect to adhere to their requirements (including the Arial font required by NSF).

Still I really like the collaborative features of GoogleDocs (especially the version tracking). It is much better to have a single version of a document available online to all collaborators rather than emailing around attachments. Hopefully someday Google will get the formatting issues fixed.