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