This is the first semester I've used Google Docs. I'm quite excited about it, because participants in my courses are getting more and better feedback. OTOH, they are all PhD and Postdoc, and used to using EndNote, which Google Docs unforunately does not support (it strips the notes). GD also doesn't support some of the common visual formats, which is fair enough. Some journals don't either.

My main problem is that there is no way to clearly show changes by different collaborators, yet we are working with articles destined for submission to refereed journals: real, professional documents.

As an English teacher, my comments on, say, a paper on microphages carry MUCH less weight than a co-author's or of the main author, and sometimes changes are through a paragraph or section. We haven't quite figured out how to cope with this. I replicate "track changes" with strike-through and underline (unwieldy at best) and use the "comment" feature a lot to give and/or explain suggestions. The co-authors seem to be doing the same, *most* of the time, but not always.

Still, we really like the program. They like that it pushes them, even if they know that in a given week I've looked at only one or two paragraphs.