Writing scientific publications is usually a challenging and complex activity, involving several authors. Despite the different natures of their contributions, this activity is clearly collaborative and the collaboration is usually achieved through face-to-face meetings and using email to exchange the documents. More recently the availability of collaborative editors introduced a further step in the collaboration, but none of the existing solutions contemplate some specific issues like referencing and publishing adequately. This fact motivated us to conduct a study to evaluate the requirements for a platform that integrates in a single solution the three main functionalities required: a text editor, a reference manager and a connector to scientific digital repositories.