Authorea.com is a web-based tool geared towards the academic research community. While the work of this group is not technically considered “academic research”, some members have produced papers at par with the academic research community (minus the citation of non-academic sources). Still, Authorea is the only tool I can currently find that offers important features that can be useful to a disconnected team of writers (see comparison to Google docs below). Although Authorea offers great features, its not perfectly suited for non-academic papers due to lack of features and inflexible restrictions (see restrictions and work-around solutions below). Lastly, I think the best thing about Authorea is how easy it is to start using it, even if you are a solo writer (I wrote this short paper on Authorea as a way to test the system).