Hi all

Regarding setting up an English-language online scientific journal in my view you need:

(a) someone who assumes responsibility for delivering the journal (b) server space (c) someone with tech skills to set up and manage the CMS (d) interesting CFPs that will motivate authors to submit despite the journal being new and not having garnered academic prestige yet (e) credible editors of special issues that will motivate authors to submit despite the journal being new, etc (f) a credible pool of reviewers / scientific committee members that will motivate authors to submit despite the journal being new, etc (g) someone with (possibly) native-English language skills to proof-read all the text

If some of you would like to guest edit a special issue of the Journal of Peer Production (JoPP) you will not need to worry about the first three criteria. You can use our pool of reviewers and add some of your own. Regarding editors, I am naturally familiar with Ward C.'s name and I have read some of Piotr K.'s work. Would these people be interested, or anyone else (Dariusz J. is supposed to be working on another CFP for JoPP so not sure if he would be interested)?

Finally I would like to draw your attention to this: http://surveys.peerproduction.net/

This is a sub-project of JoPP - it is completely independent from the journal, they are just using server space. We are planning to create a menu for such projects on our frontpage. If WP researchers wanted to create a http://wiki-research.peerproduction.net/ site where they could experiment with new methodologies etc that could be arranged, and you could migrate it to a dedicated server later if the project grows. Not sure how that would play out with support from WMF but it is not clear to me at this point anyway whether you all want to align closely with WMF or not. Anyway, just a thought.

cheers

Mathieu

On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 3:45 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.plwrote:

...

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.

SJ