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).

Great. Starting with a dedicated issue of JOPP seems like a good thing. The guest editors of that issue will get useful experience, and we can test the depth of interest among submitters and reviewers, for a specific scope of research efforts.

One key factor in getting ISI is a community to drive the journal

emijrp writes:

> 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)

Yes. All of this is important (and most could be tried out in working on a guest issue of an existing journal)

Encouragement to publish early and often requires some new form of publication that supports iteration and early drafts in the pubs process -- not via a separate preprint site.

> * supported by donations

This can include donations from universities and institutions whose staff are submitting to the journal. I suspect a young, inexpensive journal that isn't tied to a tradition of expensie overhead could be supported by a dozen universities that have relevant departments (like CCI and MIT, various complexity institutes, and centers for collaborative study or internet & society).

> 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.

That sounds like a fine intermediary, while more elaborate tech is being discussed. It is important to have crisply defined and uniformly implemented peer review, not soft "after publication" peer review -- at least for the papers that are published with the highest stamp of peer approval. It would be good to also have lower stamps of approval - and archived permalinkable copies of their work - for those who simply publish all of their work and data.

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

That would be great if WRN is interested :-) Again, joining forces to dit a one-time issue of an existing journal is a good way to see what it would be like.