Regarding the existing conversation, if we want a journal, we need to ask what the purpose is.
I'd highly recommend Jason Priem's notion of the "decoupled journal" [1][2]. Jason points out that journals have been used for four main purposes, historically:
- Registration
- Archiving
- Dissemination
- Certification
Decoupling these functions is the way forward for scholarly communication. And it's already been happening -- with ArXiV, SSRN, Math Overflow, ... and new ways of measuring research impact [3]. So which function(s) matter most to us?
We can ask:
(1) What can wikis do for the registration, archiving, and/or dissemination functions, better than existing technologies?
(2) How can wikis contribute to altmetrics [3] used for certification functions?
(3) How can we as a community surface the most interesting and powerful research? What technologies do we need? What social habits do we need?
(4) And, finally, how can our answers to #3 contribute to the certification we value? (Prestige, publications counting for tenure, ...)
I think rather than trying to create a high profile, high impact traditional journal, if we focused on these and similar questions, we would both move wiki research forward, and drive scientific communication itself forward.
-Jodi
* of course, reporting and doing research aren't an either/or -- they're closely related and one drives the other
[1] Jason Priem at Purdue:
slides
I've written a short summary here:
[2] Also a draft article called "Decoupling the scholarly journal" by Jason Priem and Bradley M. Hemminger, under review for the Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience special issue "Beyond open access: visions for open evaluation of scientific papers by post-publication peer review"