This doesn't solve your problem, but I have two thoughts that might be useful: publishing an open-access of your pay-wall papers and pushing WikiSym to the next level.

*Open access version* I've recently taken up the practice of re-writing my research papers for the internet with an open license. For example: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/summaries/The%20Rise%20and%20Decline/ I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that complete re-writes of any content represent a new creative product. Sadly, this also might cause confusion about which version of the paper is the "official" version. I've been including a letter to the reader in my online versions to reduce any confusion. This approach may solve your immediate need.

*Growing WikiSym into an open conference* WikiSym is a great venue for research on open collaboration systems. Publications though this conference are included in ACM's digital library and are, as you might expect, not open licensed. However, the WikiSym community has been on the verge of switching away from ACM towards an open license model for years. Recently WikiSym has also suffered from stagnation. Although there is a lot of work on open collaboration systems, most of the best work gets published in other, more general conferences like CSCW for a variety of reasons (higher attendance, lower acceptance rate, etc.). I see combining the academic WikiSym with the less-academic (but equally, if not more awesome) Wikimania and other conferences/symposiums/communities that are interested in this topic as one potential way to grow the conference and make it a more enticing publication venue. Such a transition might require a switch to an open publication format. I'm very interested in continuing this conversation.

-Aaron

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Jodi Schneider jschneider@pobox.comwrote:

Getting First Monday indexed in ISI would be a good step.

I have helped start an open access journal before [1] so I'd be happy to give advice. But generally, I don't think that we need more journals.

Rather, let's make open access the journals that we have. This has been done in some communities. For instance, the high energy physics community created a coalition to use existing subscription money (and perhaps new funding) to pay for making journals open access [2]. I would be happy to help create and solicit library and grant funds for such a coalition, with a group of interested people. This would start from identifying a core list of journals.

-Jodi

[1] http://journal.code4lib.org [2] http://www.scoap3.org/index.html

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.

Would some of the Wikipapers folks be interested in working on this? I'm thinking of something like a law-review model where much peer review happens by young researchers that are more junior (professionally) than the submitted papers, but very very skilled at review and editorial technique. Which fits our community as well as it does lawyers.

SJ

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 10:49 AM, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hi all;

I like the journals that work under the same (or similar) principles of free knowledge projects, a.k.a. open-access journals.

I would like to publish some paper regarding to wikis in that kind of OA publications, do you have any recommendation?

I found First Monday, which is peer-reviewed and OA, but it is not indexed in ISI. Any more suggestions?

Thanks.

Regards, emijrp

-- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWikihttp://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapershttp://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/

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-- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266

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On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:

So what does it take to get a journal indexed in ISI?

See their instruction page: http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/selection/

There is also a list of all journals that *are* indexed, which could be useful: http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/

-Jodi

-- Piotr Konieczny

On 9/14/2012 11:33 AM, Jodi Schneider wrote:

Getting First Monday indexed in ISI would be a good step.

I have helped start an open access journal before [1] so I'd be happy to give advice. But generally, I don't think that we need more journals.

Rather, let's make open access the journals that we have. This has been done in some communities. For instance, the high energy physics community created a coalition to use existing subscription money (and perhaps new funding) to pay for making journals open access [2]. I would be happy to help create and solicit library and grant funds for such a coalition, with a group of interested people. This would start from identifying a core list of journals.

-Jodi

[1] http://journal.code4lib.org [2] http://www.scoap3.org/index.html

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.

Would some of the Wikipapers folks be interested in working on this? I'm thinking of something like a law-review model where much peer review happens by young researchers that are more junior (professionally) than the submitted papers, but very very skilled at review and editorial technique. Which fits our community as well as it does lawyers.

SJ

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 10:49 AM, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hi all;

I like the journals that work under the same (or similar) principles of free knowledge projects, a.k.a. open-access journals.

I would like to publish some paper regarding to wikis in that kind of OA publications, do you have any recommendation?

I found First Monday, which is peer-reviewed and OA, but it is not indexed in ISI. Any more suggestions?

Thanks.

Regards, emijrp

-- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWikihttp://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapershttp://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/

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-- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266

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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

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

hi,

Is wiki the best platform currently [*hides from Ward*]? Is the software/configuration used by (I think) PLOS for a similar thing available somewhere to build on?

as mentioned previously, Open Journal Systems is popular http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs PLOS bases on Ambra http://www.ambraproject.org/ which looks decent, too, but I've never used it.

OJS is quite decent in managing the review process, using templates, etc. Not as decent as Manuscript Central, but open, and good enough. Ambra may be even better, maybe somebody used to edit in both and can comment.

But seriously, starting a journal is not so much about the engine, but more about the community to drive it. It wouldn't be unprecedented to start a journal by preparing 1-2 issues WITHOUT a system to process submissions at all.

best,

dj

...

But seriously, starting a journal is not so much about the engine, but more about the community to drive it.

So... volunteers? Step forward.

it is not really so much about volunteers (even though I am pretty sure that many members of this list would gladly help the editorial board), but rather of a practical wider impact, that is of an academic community which is going to receive the journal and read it (push rather than pull model). Perhaps it can be constructed around Wikipedia community, but it is not a matter of volunteering, but rather of clever sending out the message, once the journal is already out there. A question remains, whether starting a new journal from the scratch has additional benefits over supporting an already existing "Journal of Peer Production". I'm not certain either way, since there are pros and cons to both solutions, but it definitely is much less work to focus on a project which at least solved some of the startup problems :)

best,

dj

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 http://libguides.library.qut.edu.au/content.php?pid=84068&sid=624559 &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

_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

I think that an open content journal would be cheap to run. No staff - everything done by volunteers. Hosting - Wikiversity? Meta?

Perhaps I am missing something, but if so, let me know what money would be needed for. (I know some journals have paid staff of copyeditors, issue print copies, and such, but this is not really needed...).

-- Piotr Konieczny

On 9/16/2012 4:12 AM, emijrp wrote:

2012/9/15 Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com>

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)

...

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.

Thanks for your valuable tips Kerry.

About the business model, perhaps the journal can't survive by donations but by entities that receive donations. I'm talking about Wikimedia chapters. There are some powerfull chapters out there that may want to support this journal project providing human effort, resources and some money.

I think that academics and wikipedians must work together, and this can be another way.

Just an idea...

Kerry

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*From:*wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
<mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org>
[mailto: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 <mailto: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
<mailto:darekj@alk.edu.pl>>

hi,


On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Samuel Klein <sj@wikimedia.org
<mailto: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
<mailto: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 <mailto: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



_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l




-- 

Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com

Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)

Projects: AVBOT <http://code.google.com/p/avbot/> | StatMediaWiki
<http://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es> | WikiEvidens
<http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/> | WikiPapers
<http://wikipapers.referata.com> | WikiTeam
<http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/>

Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/


_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

-- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWiki http://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapers http://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/

---

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Emijrp writes: About the business model, perhaps the journal can't survive by donations but by entities that receive donations. I'm talking about Wikimedia chapters. There are some powerfull chapters out there that may want to support this journal project providing human effort, resources and some money.

Certainly if the Wikimedia Foundation could support an online journal, this would be a great outcome. As the basis of funding for the chapters appears to be changing from the model of sharing the donations based on region donating the money to one of bidding for project funding, I am not sure that the chapters will have "free funds" any more but only funds committed to specific projects (which could include the journal, of course). But as the journal is not inherently tied to any specific country, it's not clear to me which chapter(s) would/should be interested. I don't know if there are other ways to bid for WMF funding other than via chapters?

But, either way, if WMF (or its chapters) is to support this journal, it would need to fit within the WMF strategic plan:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Role_of_the_WMF

where I think this journal concept might fit under "Increase access to information to drive community and Foundation decision making and action".

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Role_of_the_WMF#Increase_a...

and specifically to address the bullet point:

Foster a healthy community of researchers among community members and researchers interested in analyzing Wikimedia; provide access to relevant data and highlight important questions to be addressed

Note that to align with the WMF strategic plan might require the scope of the journal to be constrained to matters of relevance to WMF, e.g. based on Wikpedia or other WMF projects, using WMF data or trying to answer WMF questions or, at least, research relating to non-WMF things for which some WMF implication/conclusion can be derived (e.g. it worked here so it might also work for Wikipedia). As I mentioned previously, determining the topic/scope of a journal is not easy and I don't know if everyone in this conversation would accept a "relevance to WMF" criteria.

Kerry

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 11:33 AM, Jodi Schneider jschneider@pobox.comwrote:

Getting First Monday indexed in ISI would be a good step.

Yes.

I have helped start an open access journal before [1] so I'd be happy to give advice. But generally, I don't think that we need more journals.

Well, we definitely need more arXiv topic areas or equivalents outside the hard sciences. People should be able to publish their work as quickly as they like in a professional way, especially in fields that change rapidly and need to benefit from collaborating with one another.

SJ

I don't know... how about:

You have a good project idea someone should do. You publish it. You know some people doing interesting work in the area who need x,y,z to tackle such a project, and add that. You start a project. You publish a pointer and project name. Some collaborators join. You publish names. You get a target to take data from, have a meeting, and publish. You finalize procedures and start implementing. and publish. You get first data. and publish. You get context for the data. And publish. You find time to look at the data, organize the context, add a summary, and publish. You compile a full schedule of data, and run analysis, publishing your error logs and lab notebook pages on the fly. You give a paper bag talk with slides (and publish) You draft an abstract for peer review (and publish) You finish an abstract and submit it for review (a. p.) You get feedback from the journal you submitted to (a. p.) and revise (a. p.) You get included in a major quarterly Journal, with polish (a. p.) You get public commentary, cites, criticism; and make better talk slides (a. p.) You add suggestions for your students or others to extend the work in future papers (a. p.)

Various fields adopt various subsets of the above; most have only a handful towards the end.

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Ward Cunningham ward@c2.com wrote:

On Sep 14, 2012, at 11:09 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:

People should be able to publish their work as quickly as they like in a professional way, especially in fields that change rapidly and need to benefit from collaborating with one another.

Hmm. What is the quickest way that we would ever want to publish our work? If we push on this hard enough we might change the nature of work. (Yes, I know, much in academia conspires against quick. Same for business and probably dating. But as a thought experiment, how quick could quick be?)

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There are lots of other pressures on work. Take for example the principle investigator who after decades of working within the existing system finds one day that his grants aren't to be renewed. Nor are the grants of his professional colleagues. Their labs contract but they are all still there with serious science in front of them.

I've suggested to a friend in this situation that it might be a good time to rethink how academic science works. Pain begets change. Why not get ahead of it?

I'm close enough to science to smell change in the wind. I'm not close enough to lead change. But I will cheer anyone daring enough to step out of old habits and design a future that includes what we've learned about the internet in the last decade or two.

On Sep 14, 2012, at 11:59 AM, Ward Cunningham wrote:

Yup. I'm thinking the same things. Now, if all of these were the norm, how would work be different?

On Sep 14, 2012, at 11:31 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:

...

I don't know... how about:

You have a good project idea someone should do. You publish it. You know some people doing interesting work in the area who need x,y,z to tackle such a project, and add that. You start a project. You publish a pointer and project name. Some collaborators join. You publish names. You get a target to take data from, have a meeting, and publish. You finalize procedures and start implementing. and publish. You get first data. and publish. You get context for the data. And publish. You find time to look at the data, organize the context, add a summary, and publish. You compile a full schedule of data, and run analysis, publishing your error logs and lab notebook pages on the fly. You give a paper bag talk with slides (and publish) You draft an abstract for peer review (and publish) You finish an abstract and submit it for review (a. p.) You get feedback from the journal you submitted to (a. p.) and revise (a. p.) You get included in a major quarterly Journal, with polish (a. p.) You get public commentary, cites, criticism; and make better talk slides (a. p.) You add suggestions for your students or others to extend the work in future papers (a. p.)

Various fields adopt various subsets of the above; most have only a handful towards the end.

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Ward Cunningham ward@c2.com wrote: On Sep 14, 2012, at 11:09 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:

...

People should be able to publish their work as quickly as they like in a professional way, especially in fields that change rapidly and need to benefit from collaborating with one another.

Hmm. What is the quickest way that we would ever want to publish our work? If we push on this hard enough we might change the nature of work. (Yes, I know, much in academia conspires against quick. Same for business and probably dating. But as a thought experiment, how quick could quick be?)

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-- Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266

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On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 7:59 PM, Ward Cunningham ward@c2.com wrote:

Yup. I'm thinking the same things. Now, if all of these were the norm, how would work be different?

Some similar ideas discussed in this paper, to which I contributed: "Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers" http://altchi.org/submissions/submission_wmt_0.pdf

Abstract: Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 9:40 PM, Ward Cunningham ward@c2.com wrote:

The comment you quote of mine is in response to Samuel Klein's lists of more things that should be published. If we combine his list with your experience then we have a clear view of the collision that would motivate a new kind of journal, not just a new journal.

Yes, SJ's comments were what reminded me: but I thought the paper was a good response to your question, "how would work be different".

In an older version, before we had to cut it down to submit (http://piratepad.net/ep/pad/view/Massively-Distributed-Authorship-of-Academi...) we imagined 3 scenarios; SJ's ideas are a superset of the ideas we had there as a narrative.

In particular, we imagined something called "massively-multiauthor.net", which, if it existed, might help bring an "economy of scale" to academic writing.

I think we're getting closer on the technology side every day.

[the scenarios I mentioned:]

§§ Scenario 1: A paper develops via live curation

A new interface technology has been created. Jeanette posts a draft of an abstract on a public web site. A large group of scholar-contributors are alerted to the emergence of the abstract in their discipline. A subset of the scholars, interested in advancing the specific topic and building a network, opt-in and edit the emerging paper. The group writes the paper collaboratively online, occasionally bringing in specific experts to write portions of the paper that need specialized insights. At a predetermined time, Jeanette calls for edits to stop and the team finalizes the author list which now numbers in the hundreds. A few authors unhappy with the result of the collaboration remove their name from the author list. As per the initial posting, Jeanette submits the paper to CHI via the normal review channels.

§§ Scenario 2: Dozens of contributors from around the world make small informal contributions

A few graduate students are chatting about a potential paper based on a publicly available collection of Wikipedia articles. Together they write a thousand-word summary of the core concept. They post it online, and send a link out to Facebook and Google+. Dozens of contributors from around the world make small contributions, fleshing out the body of the paper and adding their names to the author list. The initial authors check on the paper from time to time, and make a number of additional contributions. As the paper gradually comes together, the community of authors submit it to CHI.

§§ Scenario 3: Contributing to an online paper farm

Ralph, an HCI researcher, is having writer’s block, and hasn’t made progress on any of his own papers for several weeks. He goes to a public site massively-multiauthor.net linked to from WikiCFP, and browses the abstracts that have been posted for his home research conference. He finds two that are in his area of expertise and look interesting to him, and he begins to write bits of the related work sections for each of the papers. He is happy to be the 12th author on one paper, and the 29th author on the second - at least he’s making a research contribution, however small. Through the process, he meets several other researchers, and begins to talk with them about his own stalled papers. He ends up posting two of his papers on the site, and the researchers whom he met while working on the other papers help him reorganize their structure. A number of other researchers join the effort; within several weeks, Ralph is first author on two completed papers.

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 9:57 PM, Ward Cunningham ward@c2.com wrote:

Joe -- I like all three scenarios because they seem to have been "plucked from reality". However, I worry...

Wikipedia has shown that such massive collaboration is possible. But Wikipedia also operates under some norms that may not extend gracefully to the scenarios you suggest... I'm thinking specifically of "no original research".

arXiv.org has dealt fairly well with the question and perils of original research. I regret that they've pulled back from potential growth -- if they had found a way to limit their overhead further, that model could be used much more widely today than it is.

Some of the most powerful ideas we can pass on are ways to do important, complex, and creative things without 'overhead' that feels painful and 'expensive'. The entire edifice of academia is built on a society in which some professions are dedicated to peer review, knowledge production, teaching, writing, and dissemination. As long as we live in a society that cherishes this, anything we can dream of in the universe of knowledge organization and sharing is possible -- and already implicitly has all of the support that it needs to succeed. The greatest obstacles are those we throw up ourselves.

My suspicion is that to be successful, a massively collaborating academia will have to revise traditional assumptions of leadership

Yes. Just getting work done, allowing people of all backgrounds and ages to lead wherever they have time and inclination, is a fine first-order solution to this problem. In the journal universe, Law Reviews managed this nicely (the history of how and why they settled on student-run reviews is worth a discussion of its own).

Its a good time to think big, especially if big doesn't cost too much.

Truly priceless things rarely cost money; they are outside our financial shorthand. But they are tied to our dreams and our sense of humanity. This is why the most extraordinary dreams are often attainable, and draw whole societies with them.

SJ

Indeed, perhaps we should take a closer look at the Research Portal of Wikiversity:

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Portal:Research

-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Kerry Raymond Sent: Monday, 17 September 2012 1:55 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Open-Access journals for papers about wikis

I don't think the "no original research" rule would apply to a research journal that was hosted/sponsored/whatever by WMF. It's a reasonable rule for Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia but I don't think anyone (that mattered) would think it should apply to a research journal about Wikipedia, WMF, etc.

Should we be thinking of this journal as a new WMF project (a stablemate to Wikipedia, Wikiversity, etc)?

Kerry

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On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 2:57 AM, Ward Cunningham ward@c2.com wrote:

Its a good time to think big, especially if big doesn't cost too much.

Yeah! And for this reason, I think the best and most useful option (out of the ones that people are suggesting here) is ALL. Why not have a mainstream journal *and* reinvent research as we know it? After all, many hands make light work!

Furthermore, we should have many communities with different norms. Typically that will also mean different software. The ones that grow stale will fade out. And the ones that possess a certain special something will transform.

For instance... it makes sense that we're *currently* having this conversation on a mailing list, and not, say, on http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Portal_talk:Research (c/o Kerry Raymond) -- who here gets a feed of that in their inbox (at present)?

Still, as much as we should absolutely dream big and talk big, let's also dream small and imagine some nice concrete next steps. Maybe we should fork part of the conversation to one or more of these pages?

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Portal_talk:Research ? http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Village_pump/en ? http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Index ?

(Note here we see one of the possible downsides of "ALL", namely, conversations can and usually do fragment, so I think a good short-term goal would be to decide on ONE place that we might want to gather to continue talking about "this sort of thing". That way, we can fragment and come back together in useful ways. It could just be "this mailing list"...)

Dear all,

For the benefits of being readable to general readers across disciplines and regions, I suggest that we provide short descriptions on acronyms such as ISI, SSCI, SCI, etc.

As the discussion on open-access journals here, it may be helpful if we distinguish the "pragmatic purpose" of publishing as the following two categories

(1) indicators of "performance" and/or "excellence" for institutional use: this is where the issues of being included by major commercial citation index lie. Researchers, especially those need to respond to academic peer review, need to identify journals that are more established (and thus sometimes pro-status quo, more conservative). For example, the barriers to be included in the well-known Science Citation Index (SCI), and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) could be very high depending on the disciplines. It might be easier first to compile a list of established journals if the need is to publish in these journals in response to institutional performance requirement. Perhaps one can data-mine from the currently available Wiki-related bibliography?

(2) indicators of "relevance" and/or "searchability" for general public use: this is where the issue of making the research outcome accessible and useful for the general public, e.g. outside the pay-wall, searchable on the Web, etc. For that, I personally think old-style mailing lists (like this one) and personal blogs may work just fine. Do not forget the Wikimedia Research Newsletter as well.

It is a big issue of political economy of academic publishing and funding when it comes to the convergence/divergence of open access journals and the established journals/citation indexes. While everyone could be vocal about their efforts and rationals, I think it is equally important to describe the publishing landscape fairly so as to provide guidelines for new researchers to reach their diverse goals in their life/career.

One advice is to raise the issue also in the scholarly communication channels in the established disciplines, regarding which of their ISI-included established journals are open access (OA) or similar. For media/communication studies, one can try JCMC, which is both OA and included in the SSCI with pretty performance numbers.

Best, han-teng liao

On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 2:18 AM, Ward Cunningham ward@c2.com wrote:

On Sep 14, 2012, at 11:09 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:

People should be able to publish their work as quickly as they like in a professional way, especially in fields that change rapidly and need to benefit from collaborating with one another.

Hmm. What is the quickest way that we would ever want to publish our work? If we push on this hard enough we might change the nature of work. (Yes, I know, much in academia conspires against quick. Same for business and probably dating. But as a thought experiment, how quick could quick be?)

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This has been proposed before, and I do support it - I think a good case can be made that there is a field in Wikipedia studies (or on a larger scale, wiki studies) - yet there is no dedicated journal. This needs to change.

-- Piotr Konieczny

On 9/14/2012 11:00 AM, Samuel Klein 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.

Would some of the Wikipapers folks be interested in working on this? I'm thinking of something like a law-review model where much peer review happens by young researchers that are more junior (professionally) than the submitted papers, but very very skilled at review and editorial technique. Which fits our community as well as it does lawyers.

SJ

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 10:49 AM, emijrp <emijrp@gmail.com mailto:emijrp@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all;

I like the journals that work under the same (or similar)
principles of free knowledge projects, a.k.a. open-access journals.

I would like to publish some paper regarding to wikis in that kind
of OA publications, do you have any recommendation?

I found First Monday, which is peer-reviewed and OA, but it is not
indexed in ISI. Any more suggestions?

Thanks.

Regards,
emijrp

-- 
Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com
Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)
Projects: AVBOT <http://code.google.com/p/avbot/> | StatMediaWiki
<http://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es> | WikiEvidens
<http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/> | WikiPapers
<http://wikipapers.referata.com> | WikiTeam
<http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/>
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/


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-- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266

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