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)
Topic. Deciding the topic might seem easy but will prove harder as the boundaries will be stretched by everyone to include some remarkably esoteric stuff (design by committee). Lets start with is the focus just on Wikipedia projects or should it be broader? just to kick off the arguments. But although the topic is probably harder to agree than everyone thinks, nonetheless it can probably reach a consensus eventually.
Community. Well, clearly theres a community just in this mailing list, and its usually easy to find folks to write if you meet the academically-respectable criteria (because folks need publications for grants and tenure etc). But its harder to find readers and reviewers and editors (as there arent the same rewards as for publication).
Business model. Running a journal will cost money servers, bandwidth, or hosting etc as a minimum and probably to pay for someones time to be the web master and general gopher. Frankly, donations and volunteerism are unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. Ask anyone who offers up donation-ware. Very few people pay for what they can get for free. When you have something on the scale of popularity of Wikipedia, you can just squeeze enough donations to keep it going. The scale here would be totally different. Most open access journals ask the authors to pay some kind of fee, which can be a barrier to publication for some authors it depends on grants, institutional policy, etc. See here for my universitys policy (which is well-regarded in its support for open access so I dont think it is typical):
http://libguides.library.qut.edu.au/content.php?pid=84068 http://libguides.library.qut.edu.au/content.php?pid=84068&sid=624559 &sid=624559
And most volunteer-only activities run aground on the rocky shoals of there being tasks to be done that are too large, too immediate or too unrewarding for any volunteer to take them on. Which is why paying someone to do these tasks eventually becomes the only solution, but again needs money. Wikimedia Foundation has paid staff and there are good reasons for it. But the activity can probably start with volunteers so long as there is a recognition that over time we will discover what we cant easily get volunteers to do and bit the bullet and pay for those tasks to be done.
Processes. Traditional reviewing processes for quality will to be required for academic respectability. I note the Journal of Peer Productions willingness to publish any article so long as the reviews accompany it might not meet the standard of quality that my university requires (although I will ask at work because I think its an interesting model). But as I say, my university is more open to open than many others are.
In short, I think the hardest nut to crack is the business model (i.e. money and peoples time). I think the other things can be worked out.
Kerry
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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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