Can't beat Google Docs and similar for writing collaboration for larger teams and/or less code-oriented coauthors, so the placeholder-style workflow lives on for now. But having more good options and closing that gap is a huge win.

Got a preview of the upcoming Quarto 2 collaborative editor a few months ago, and it's genuinely very very cool and huge step toward practical collaborative code-driven manuscript workflows. May become my default for solo-ish projects or where collaborators are at least a little code savvy.

Why yes I am 40 how did you know

I have a paper that is about the fundamental and immutable severity of our causal inferential powers and our tendency to fool ourselves about them and it has a hidden Missy Elliott lyric and title that's a backronym from the Blondie comics. Sometimes, you just need the levity to get through.

⬇️ The Registered Revisions Meta Trial Pilot Report documents the development & pilot of a new approach to peer review that asks authors to precommit to substantive revisions before conducting new analyses. It also details the multi-journal trial design, workflows, infrastructure, & lessons learned.

I bet you in particular would find the meta trial design bit interesting. There's a whole giant class of multi-unit policy experiments that are thwarted by coordination, incentive, and design flexibility problems. Maybe the meta trial idea goes a long way toward enabling them?

So check it out! We think it might have genuine potential to really change the way we do both policy impact evaluation and peer review. I am STOKED to show eveyrone the process and not just the result (main results coming next year). We want your thoughts! Reply, email, takedown thread, whatever.

And there's some bonuses in there. You want simulations???? Heck yeah you do. We needed some way to understand the whole Registered Revisions and policy process, plus bonuses like pre-writing our analysis code based on simulated data. How about a live demo webapp? Yup.

Most importantly, what did the pilot journal editors (coauthors) think about the whole thing? What worked well, what was frustrating, and what went horribly wrong? We compiled our editorial team's thoughts so you can see for yourselves with (we think?) no sugar coating, good and bad alike.

How about workflows and templates for integrating the Registered Revisions policy into standard editorial processes? Yeah we got that. You want infrastructure? You're covered. A whole webapp based system for participant management and tracking designed to work with normal editorial touchpoints.

Part 2: the Pilot, with a crew of kickass journal editors and co designers. Unlike standard pilots confirming or adjusting a well-developed trial, we needed to build this plane as we were flying it. The "pathfinder" pilot was more co-development than test implementation. Everyone pitched in a TON.

<record scratch> "You may be wondering how we got here". That's Part 1, and it starts with a curveball (no spoilers). Nearly everything in this project was developed by necessity (sometimes unexpected), from the policy itself to the meta trial design to the (non-obvious) outcomes selection.

To estimate its impact, we are doing something out of the box: a "meta trial" Rather than one big trial with a bunch of journals or a hopeful meta-analysis of independent trials, we do a bit of both. One centralized design and infrastructure, but with flexible independent journal-based trials.