Hej, this is great. I think you should consider the following combined model:
* Organize [papers] and [reviews] on a wiki. Aim for open collaboration and discussion among researchers in the draft phase. [papers] := drafts, data, analysis, reflists; casual peer review [reviews] := comments, questions, ideas, connections
* Publish a less formal monthly update, perhaps in tandem with the WMF Research Newsletter
* Organize a selection process every 4-6 months : # an editorial team chooses the best new work, asks the authors for a snapshot to send to formal peer review. # organize more formal blind peer review [FPR], with reviewers who don't take part in the casual reviews above. # make an editorial decision of how much of the backstory (data, commentary, interlinking & cross-refs) to include in the snapshot.
* Collate the accepted output of this FPR into a paginated snapshot with a little editorial love: an introduction, cover matter, a description of the journal and submission process [for anyone who finds a printout or epub of just that snapshot]. These are the formal issues circulated to libraries, invited to journal parties, &c. Each article should link to its history page [and in the future, both its article history and its dataset history].
I'm pretty sure that libraries at Harvard and MIT would pick up a subscription. And we could start soliciting submissions from colleagues who do great work and don't mind (or love the idea of) having a possibly seminal paper published in this sort of new-style journal.
SJ
PS - a few nice features of a successful journal, in my opinion: 1) authors will start to decide for themselves how to credit a crowd of dozens of people who contributed to a final paper, @ varying levels of detail 2) the ratio of (bibliography + footnotes) / (body) will be significantly higher than in other journals 3) the density of interlinks and cross-references will be high 4) in the living / online version of the journal, articles will be published with transclusions from other research
On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 6:24 PM, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
I like the draft design. Here's an idea on how to do tackle the double blind peer review, wiki way:
- anonymous submissions: let's have a public account for submissions
(username and password either listed on the journal page, or given out by editor through email). This being meta or wikiversity, vandalism shouldn't be an issue. Interested authors can contact editor(s) by email, providing them with real name, and submit the anonymous paper through the submission account. 2) anonymous reviews: interested reviewers would use a similar anonymous reviewer account to make comments, signing as Reviewer 1, Reviewer 2, etc. Editor(s) would of course now their identities (through it is not as necessary as in the case of the author).
Things to consider: a) should we accept anonymous reviewers, as in - even the editor(s) don't know their identity? This would be an issue if the reviewer username/password are made public. b) should be accept non-anonymous reviews, i.e. what to do if a regular wikieditor comments using their normal account? I think we should allow this, to encourage people to make small comment, without committing themselves fully to a review, with the understanding that the non-anonymous reviews are not counted as "official" reviews, for the purpose of double-blind peer review / indices assessment.
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 11/2/2012 8:39 AM, Pierre-Carl Langlais wrote:
I have just made a very quick draft to have a general idea of what the journal could be : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Alexander_Doria/First_Proposal_for_a_Wik...
It includes notably a « Making-Of » section that comprises all the working and contextual texts that are not visible in most academic journals.
PCL
As far as my experience goes, the required group of editors would be an editor-in-chief, an executive committee and a scientific committee, mostly responsible for the peer reviews. Since I would like to participate, this reminds me what criteria would be adopt for recruiting these, and how this decision will be taken. I also assume that one or more universities (or an academic institution, for that matter) would have to provide support - as of, "published by...".
Of course, this is the traditional way... Some things can be changed, but others need to be retained in order for the journal to receive academic recognition.
Juliana.
On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Pierre-Carl Langlais < langlais.qobuz@gmail.com> wrote:
One idea would be to appoint one or several volunteer editor(s). They could ensure all the formal and administrative aspects of the journal: receiving and anonymizing the propositions, publishing them on the wiki, editing the final Wiki and PDF versions, keep in touch with ISI and other evaluation system and so on…
@emirjp : well you can already count me in :)
Not my case, but I understand that there are people in that situation.
This story was the same in 2001, when people thought that only an expert-written encyclopedia with very rigid methods would be successful.
Good for you, but it is somewhat irrelevant. I'd speculate that possibly even most of the academic journals' production is done by people who do have to care where they publish. Per comparing the situation to Wikipedia in 2001, I want to firmly state that oranges are much better than apples.
Entering the journal rankings is based on citation numbers, right? I did this suggest thinking on the valuable researchers in this list, which may be interested in publishing/peer-reviewing stuff in the journal. Won't you cite that papers?
The JCR journal ranking, which so far is the only one that matters (in spite of its major flaws, methodological issues, etc.), bases on the number of citations counted ONLY in other journals already listed in it.
But there are also threshold requirements to be even considered for JCR ranking, and obviously a double-blind peer reviews is a must. For practical reasons of indexing, paper redistribution, etc., PDFs and numbered pages also make life of a person who wants to cite a paper much easier.
While I support your idea in principle, I think that it requires much more effort, planning, and understanding of how academic publishing and career paths actually work, than in the concept of "all we need is wiki".
cheers,
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