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I recall hearing about someone who wrote their BA/MA/PhD thesis using Google Docs (or a similar platform) and shared the entire writing process publicly in real time. This person made the process open to demonstrate transparency in academic writing, offering a sharp contrast to the secretive plagiarism uncovered in the Guttenberg plagiarism case.

I've been unable to find any information about this person through web searches. Does anyone know of this, or perhaps a similar example?

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    Seems like a lot of bother for something that almost no one ever gets accused of. Just don't plagiarize in the first place for starters.
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Sep 27 at 13:36
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    Transient real-time information as google offers seems to have nothing to do with plagiarism prevention, protection or detection. If someone plagiarises in real-time and no one has the time to see it, did they really plagiarise? This seems more like a publicity stunt.
    – MisterMiyagi
    Commented Sep 28 at 7:03
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    You are asking a very narrow question and I'm wondering why. If your goal is to decide whether to do this or not, I'd suggest changing the question to be more direct. The one current answer is not an answer to this specific question, though it might be good advice. What do you really need to know?
    – Buffy
    Commented Sep 28 at 14:03
  • Yes, this is not the only, and maybe not even a reasonable way to stop plagiarism. However, I find the transparency aspect very appealing. I was looking for this example because I saw parallels as to open source science, where the code is shared in a git-based system (e.g. GitHub).
    – Ratnanil
    Commented Oct 1 at 12:59

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You are not going to stop plagiarism by making the writing process transparant. There are other tools for that. It may help to prevent going through many hypotheses until you find one that is "significant". Keeping the write process transparant for this purpose is often discussed under the label pre-registration. Combine that with a clear procedure for making sure that the study can be replicated, and you are well on your way to open science.

There are multiple initiatives in this realm. Often this involves not just writing but also study design, data collection, data preparation and analysis, ... One such initiative is: https://osf.io/ . On that site you can find numerous examples of real research projects.

This may be overkill for bachelors and master projects. For them I would simulate the process by letting them pre-register their project with me. I will be explicit about it, so it is a learning experience. For PhD projects the of site can definitely be useful.

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