Internet Git repository for collaboration on a paper

Question

I've just started using git for tracking changes in a LaTeX paper I'm writing, and for collaboration with co-authors.

However, I cannot find easily private git repositories with reasonable plans for scientific collaboration (I'm not asking about discounts, just about a different workflow, so no "one team of n developers", but there are "many small project, with different people").

There is ScribTeX, but unfortunately they are going down :/.

Other:

• GitHub free for students (otherwise $7/month): only 5 repos
  (it will work but not for a long time or I will need to delete my repositories)
• Bitbucket free: only n=5, next ($10/month): only n=10
• Assembla free: priv, but no bug-tracking; next ($9/month): n=3

So, is there a (La)TeX-oriented Git (or, say, Mercurial) repository service?

That is, I'm looking for a repository (free or reasonably priced - i.e. for one with a PhD student salary, not a programmer salary :))

• allowing for:
  • many collaborators,
  • many private repositories,
• but can have strong limits on:
  • users per repository,
  • repository size.

Answer 1

Aditya's comment should be the accepted answer:

Bitbucket offers unlimited private repos for academic users.

Answer 2

Consider asking your research institute/university IT services.

• In terms of fees, I'd consider such a tool as necessary for scientific work as your office chair, or backup disks/servers. My personal experience with asking for a git repository on a file server was that our director immediately answered "if that's what is needed for work, it needs to be installed." - that was it.

• The far more important concern is, where research in progress and possibly data will end up. Storing such sensitive data outside the collaborating institutes is by default a big NO, even though lots of people send their research data by skype or dropbox.
  You'd be totally screwed up if you run into ownership/privacy problems.
  Even Bitbucket (who have "academic license") have write in their terms such statements (there are other statements about you retaining ownership of your data, privacy etc.):

  End User hereby grants Atlassian a non-exclusive license to copy, distribute, perform, display, store, modify, and otherwise use End User Data in connection with operating the Hosted Services.

• For some areas of research it is even more NO, e.g. I work with patient data...

• git works very well with distributed systems, even if they are only seldom connected. Worst case, people can email patches.

• But installing git on a server is easy and people may get an ssh login, and that is all you need to have for your private git repository inside your institution IT structure, which avoids all that privacy trouble.

Answer 3

Personally I am using Bitbucket and create a new user for each project. If you have Gmail you can create an infinite number of email addresses using the + syntax, e.g. yourname+tag@gmail.com where tag can be any word.

Another option is to share a bitbucket user account with many people. Just add everybody's public key to that account and locally set the author of the git repository to their individual name and email. Push and pull do not care who's pushing and pulling whose commit. Disadvantage of this approach is that all users will be able to access all repositories. So it works best for collaboration within a research group.