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 there’s a community just in this mailing list, and it’s usually easy to find folks to write if you meet the academically-respectable criteria (because folks need publications for grants and tenure etc). But it’s harder to find readers and reviewers and editors (as there aren’t 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 someone’s 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 university’s policy (which is well-regarded in its support for open access so I don’t think it is typical):

 

http://libguides.library.qut.edu.au/content.php?pid=84068&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 can’t 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 Production’s 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 it’s 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 people’s time). I think the other things can be worked out.

 

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)