I wonder if a better place to innovate might be in the conduct of research, rather than the reporting, review and publication of research?
While wiki speeds collaboration within a community, the research literature favors long-lasting contributions outside the community. Wiki or wiki-like collaboration tools might be better applied to stimulating and conducting high-quality research that will then usefully feed existing publications.
I assume here that Wikipedia and the like have been sufficiently successful to raise more research questions and to enable more research methods than this community has time and/or ability to pursue. (If topics were scarce then they might be usefully hoarded.)
Of course there are many ways to share methods and directions and lots have already been applied in this community. However, I get the impression that results still take months or years to produce.
Aside: I have built a data mining tool and methodology, Exploratory Parsing, that can read all of Wikipedia in 10 seconds for a useful notion of "read". I have also created a Federated Wiki that promotes wiki-like sharing without need for a common vision or agreed social norms. I intend to combine the two to make an experiment manager where setups are easily shared and where methodological improvements and/or research redirections easily build on other's work in progress.
What would our environment have to be like before our collaborative cycle time is reduced to days?
On Nov 4, 2012, at 2:27 PM, Chitu Okoli wrote:
On one hand, I agree that readership is very important. On the other hand, I don't believe it is the most critical issue. I think the most critical matter in starting a new journal is to *attract high-quality submissions* --that is, to get researchers who do high quality work to submit some of their best research to the journal. If that can be achieved, then a high readership is virtually guaranteed. Other benefits should readily follow: high citations, ISI listing, etc.
I've been reading all the comments on this thread carefully, and I see two distinct issues that are being mixed into one: (1) a new journal dedicated to research about wikis, and maybe also about related phenomena; and (2) a journal with new kind of wiki-based peer review system. I think it is best to rather keep these issues distinct.