2012/9/15 Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com>

To establish a journal (of any kind), you need a:

Topic

A community to read, write, review and do editorial duties in that topic

A business model to keep it afloat

A set of processes that make it academically respectable (for the folks who need this for grants, tenure etc)

...

In short, I think the hardest nut to crack is the business model (i.e. money and people’s time). I think the other things can be worked out.

Thanks for your valuable tips Kerry.

About the business model, perhaps the journal can't survive by donations but by entities that receive donations. I'm talking about Wikimedia chapters. There are some powerfull chapters out there that may want to support this journal project providing human effort, resources and some money.

I think that academics and wikipedians must work together, and this can be another way.

Just an idea...

Kerry

From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of emijrp
Sent: Saturday, 15 September 2012 7:12 PM
To: darekj@alk.edu.pl; Research into Wikimedia content and communities; Samuel Klein
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Open-Access journals for papers about wikis

The idea of creating a journal just for wikis is highly seductive for me.The "pillars" might be:

* peer-reviewed, but publish a list of rejected papers and the reviewers comments
* open-access (CC-BY-SA)
* ask always for the datasets and offer them to download, the same for the developed software used in the research
* encourage authors to publish early, publish often (as in free software)
* supported by donations

And... we can open a wiki where those who want can write papers in a collaborative and public way. You can start a new paper with colleagues or ask for volunteers authors interested in joining to your idea. When authors think that paper is finished and stable, they submit it to the journal and it is peer-reviewed again and published or discarded and returned to the wiki for improvements.

Perhaps we may join efforts with the Wikimedia Research Newsletter? And start a page in meta:? ; )

2012/9/15 Dariusz Jemielniak <darekj@alk.edu.pl>

hi,

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Samuel Klein <sj@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I've been thinking recently that we should start this journal. There isn't an obvious candidate, despite some of the amazing research that's been done, and the extreme
> transparency that allows much deeper work to be done on wiki communities in the future.

I'll gladly help and support the idea. I think that just as Mathieu
pointed out, The Journal of Peer Production is a good candidate, since
it is already out there and running (even if low on the radar).
Otherwise, there can be of course a journal dedicated to wiki-related
work, it is quite easy to set it up (e.g. on Open Journal Systems
platform). The key is not setting up a journal, since this is an easy
part, but building a community that would regularly read it and
contribute. In this sense Wikipedia may be a good common ground.

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 7:41 PM, Piotr Konieczny <piokon@post.pl> wrote:

> So what does it take to get a journal indexed in ISI?

The procedure is quite lengthy and not entirely transparent. In short,
you request being reviewed and from issue X onwards they check how
often an average article from the journal is cited in other ISI
journals. If you go above the threshold, you're in. The problem is
that Thomson arbitrarily decides whether they want to audit a journal,
arbitrarily calculates what constitutes an "article" (yes, it is not
clear - some journals have editorials counted, some don't, in some
cases Thomson calculates the citations for non-articles, but does not
include the number of non-articles in the equation. Scientific, right?
;) invited articles count... or not, research notes - same, etc.). Oh,
and also Thomson arbitrarily may or may not punish by banning you from
ISI for real or imaginary manipulations (such as inbreed citations -
some editors encourage citing other articles from the same journal,
since they count like any others from the ISI list). There's actually
a whole body of literature on journal rankings. Still, this is the
game we have to play.

One key factor in getting ISI is a community to drive the journal - if
Wikipedia research community was widely willing to support one new
journal, received updates etc., it would likely get cited and go off
the ground (the case of "The Academy of Management Learning and
Education" - on the ISI 2 years after the first issue, if I remember
correctly).

Btw, CSCW is on ISI list, but is not open access.

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 6:26 PM, Aaron Halfaker
<aaron.halfaker@gmail.com> wrote:
> Growing WikiSym into an open conference

unfortunately, this does not help in some fields. For instance, in
management/organization studies conference papers don't count at all,
so actually there is a strong incentive not to go to a conference such
as WikiSym, since it results in wasting a paper you cannot really
publish in way that would count. European RAEs rely more and more
heavily on ISI and on ERIH rankings, so also non-ranked journals do
not count anymore.

best,

dariusz

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Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com

Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)

Projects: AVBOT | StatMediaWiki | WikiEvidens | WikiPapers | WikiTeam

Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/

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