Is there a way to share a DRAFT journal article before publishing/posting it? For instance is there a URL for the DRAFT that would be visible if I included it in a DM to another iNatter? This would give a journal author a chance to get feedback from other members of the community before finally publishing the article.
The same type of feedback is obviously available from reader comments on a published article which can then be added as edits. I just want to get things straight with the first edition!
If u collaborate w them often you could invite them to co-admin an iNat project with you and initially write the posts there (where they can preview them), even if u ultimately publish in a personal iNat journal. Screen grabs work well too but without working links.
If you want it to stay private until you have gotten feedback on it, you can use Google Drive or Google Docs, and share the document with people via email or a sharing link. Google Docs is a very popular tool for collaboration that lets people write comments throughout the document or suggest changes.
Another option would be to upload it to a pre-print server such as biorxiv.org or ecoevorxiv.org. This would make the manuscript fully visible to anyone interested in reading it, and is intended for late-stage drafts that are essentially complete and ready to be read. If your article is still in an early stage, this would not be a good option.
I was unclear in my earlier question: Folks are responding to a slightly different scenario than what I’m considering. I’m not concerned about a draft of an article for a science or peer-reviewed journal. There are many ways to share such a draft or pre-publication version.
My question is about a draft iNaturalist journal entry on the iNaturalist website at \https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/…\ such as this screen capture:
This is in the Preview mode of my draft article. I would like the ability to share a functional but draft version of such an article with selected reviewers on iNaturalist.org.
Given that many people have expressed their approval of the idea of a wiki-style page for identification info on iNat, it seems to me that there may indeed be use cases for something like this. I can imagine, e.g., people who are using projects to collaborate wanting to be able to jointly compose journal posts for that project.
iNat does not provide good options for identifier collaboration and I think it is worthwhile exploring ways that this could be improved. However, I suspect that allowing multiple people to view and edit journal posts (if feasible at all) would require some not insubstantial changes on the back end about how posts are linked with users and introduction of some kind of version history would also be desirable.
For now, using some external tool for collaborative document editing (there are alternatives to Google Docs if one prefers) seems like it would likely be the best solution for getting feedback on a journal post before posting, though obviously it is far from ideal (e.g., this may require that everyone who is interested in collaborating to have a user account and agree on what tool they want to use; content would have to be recreated by the author of the post both on iNat and in the other document which may use different formatting conventions, etc.).
For a draft that is more-or-less finished where one wants feedback from a reader perspective (about clarity, layout, etc), another option might be simply to publish the journal post and get feedback on the public version. Unless it is likely that the journal post would end up getting reworked completely in response to feedback, I don’t personally see that subsequent small changes to the content would be a major problem or a source of confusion.
