[Steuard]

True. I started using Subversion and then Mercurial for writing scientific papers during grad school (a distributed VCS was handy when editing on multiple machines), but it never seemed worth the effort to teach my collaborators how to use them from scratch.

[carlob]

There are lot of people who use Dropbox for its version control features, albeit limited they might be. It might not scale well with many users and branching, but it's probably good enough for two researchers editing the same paper on two different machines in the same office.

There might be a market for a good automated multi user version control (no programming required)…