Notes on notes 10: A comment on NowComment now

• August 22, 2013

Not really a note as much as a reminder. NowComment is a system for online collaborative discussion, or put more simply, it lets a bunch of people leave comments on a single document. Sounds a bit like a Google Doc, right? There’s certainly some similarity, in that documents can be commented on, but the annotations are the real focus here. The closest analogue may then be Genius, but with more flexibility in document content.

This could be a great way for manuscript authors to do collaborative edits without the unfortunate status quo of sending Word files back and forth. It could also work well for journal clubs. In theory, just upload a PDF and have everyone comment on the same document. In practice, I couldn’t get NowComment to accept an uploaded PDF (This one - https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/24/11/pdfs/18-0381.pdf along with a few similarly formatted documents) without throwing an error and refusing. Disappointing, but there is a workaround: copy and paste the HTML version of the manuscript using NowComment’s copy n’ paste option. You get something like this and can highlight sentences or entire paragraphs. See below.