A number of things have prompted me to be thinking about what makes a piece of writing “original” in a web based world where we might draft things in the open, get informal public peer review, where un-refereed conference posters can be published online, and pre-print servers of submitted versions of papers are increasingly widely used.

A session entitled “The Future of the Paper” at Science Online London 2009 was a panel made up of an interesting set of people, Lee-Ann Coleman from the British Library, Katharine Barnes the editor of Nature Protocols, Theo Bloom from PLoS and Enrico Balli of SISSA Medialab. The panelists rehearsed many of the issues and problems that have been discussed before and I won’t re-hash here.

In the previous post  I discussed a workflow using Wave to author and publish a paper. In this post I want to look at the possibility of using it as a laboratory record, or more specifically as a human interface to the laboratory record. There has been much work in recent years on research portals and Virtual Research Environments.

I, and many others have spent the last week thinking about Wave and I have to say that I am getting more, rather than less, excited about the possibilities that this represents. All of the below will have to remain speculation for the moment but I wanted to walk through two use cases and identify how the concept of a collaborative automated document will have an impact.