[RCom-l] Peer reviewed journal?

Tue Sep 27 01:39:16 UTC 2011

Having founded and run a peer reviewed journal with Springer over the last 2 years (I stepped down as editor-in-chief a few months ago due to incompatibility with my new WMF duties) – and having considered an OA option at the time of writing the first proposal for this journal back in 2009 – I thought I'd share my 2 cents.

Costs of creating a new journal
What are the benefits of creating a dedicated OA journal for Wikipedia research? Traditional, closed access journals are run mostly by scholarly societies or by editorial boards to increase the visibility of research within their respective communities. OA is producing a number of disruptive changes in scholarly publishing. One of these disruptive changes is in the function and scope of journals. The most promising model OA publishers appear to be currently pursuing (based on the talks Daniel and I heard last week at COASP '11– a report on RCom-l will follow shortly) is the one of so-called OA mega-journals. These mega-journals are blurring the boundaries between traditional, narrow-focused scholarly journals and large OA repositories such as ArXiV; mega-journals publish papers in virtually every field and promise a large distribution, a lighter peer-review model (inspired by post-publication filtering criteria) and in some cases (e.g. PLoS One) increased visibility and bibliometric impact. These journals appear to be cannibalizing resources and readers from traditional journals and I think it's fair to expect that in 5 years from now most research will be published in 5-6 large OA journals acting as global research repositories and undermining the need of narrowly focused (and closed access) disciplinary outlets. At the moment, the only serious advantage of creating a new journal is to bridge a disciplinary gap, to build a new research community or to create/reinforce a brand, but there are other important costs to consider if one wants to go for an OA option (see below) and my question is: wouldn't our community be equally well served if it were to publish its research in one of the many OA journals already available? Would community and brand creation justify the effort of creating a new outlet instead of, say, creating and tracking an on-demand collection of articles within one or more existing, general-purpose OA journals? To put it bluntly: do we need a journal or a feed?

Costs of going OA
Setting up and running a journal, especially without the support of a traditional publisher, requires an insane amount of effort. As an author or reviewer of a journal, one typically sees only the tip of the iceberg of the editorial and publication workflow, which includes, among other things, effectively triaging and dispatching submissions, inviting and chasing reviewers, supervising the production process, promoting the journal in relevant outlets, maintaining relations with organizations that store/consume metadata and evaluate contents. A self-run journal, without the support of a dedicated production team, also incurs extra costs related to manuscript handling, copyediting, proof creation. OA publishers typically offset these extra costs by charging author fees, which are only waived in particular circumstances. Creating and running a successful OA journal is definitely not something a group of people can achieve as a hobby or with limited financial resources.

Supplementary barriers to OA
Crazy as it may sound, in 2011 OA is just starting to get traction. When starting a new journal, the question you typically face is whether you want to have a high scholarly impact within your community (i.e. attract and publish the best research within your field) or change the rules of the game (e.g. embrace OA, publish open-licensed research or explore new, disruptive editorial models). With the exception of OA mega journals and some popular niche journals, by creating a new journal you *either* seek impact *or* game change. The risk is that, as a new OA journal, you'll get to publish papers that have gone through cascading peer review (rejected by other outlets) and that for some reason have failed to be submitted to OA mega journals. One could try an experiment in publishing OA research without focusing on impact, but the effort and risk involved in making this project successful are even higher.

So my recommendation would be: forget about, "it sounds easy, let's try it" as this will result in a lot of frustration and wasted efforts. If someone wants to work on the creation of a new OA journal what's needed is a sound business plan with an analysis of risks and costs involved and an assessment of all, less costly and equally effective alternatives (which at the moment I'd be personally in favor of considering).

Dario

On Sep 25, 2011, at 8:46 AM, Goran Milovanovic wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> the idea on having a peer-reviewed journal specifically related to
> Wikimedia/Wikipedia needed research that Milos and I have discussed
> was, of course, to start small.
> 
> The idea is to start with a set of dedicated pages that would publish
> Wikimedia related research, focusing on the needs generated by the
> community, Rcom or the WMF, and trying to establish consistency of
> standards and some at least minimal periodicity. The publishing
> process would involve peer review from the beginning. I don't believe
> it would be hard to establish a journal editorial in this case.
> 
> Of course, the merger with initiatives such as Wikimedia Summer of
> Research is a natural way to go.
> 
> Then we would see what happens. If it happens to be useful (I bet) and
> sustainable (the hard part: sustainable in terms of periodicity, norms
> and quality), why not start thinking bigger than the initial small and
> see if we can push it to a level of a significant journal in the
> fields of socio-technical systems, user-computer interaction, online
> collaboration and similar.
> 
> Best,
> Goran
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>> The idea of a journal is very sound by itself. I doubt that
>> Wikiversity will be helpful.
>> Kind regards
>> Ziko
>> 
>> 
>> 2011/9/22 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
>>> On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 14:38, WereSpielChequers
>>> <werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Would this be a logical thing to have as part of Wikiversity?
>>>> 
>>>> Peer review does seem to me very like a Featured article process but with
>>>> credentialled reviewers.
>>> 
>>> Huh. Wikiversity has its own problems. Since Cormac Lawler went out of
>>> WV, its integrity is very questionable. However, I agree that
>>> organized boost into the right direction is something which WV needs.
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> RCom-l mailing list
>>> RCom-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/rcom-l
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Ziko van Dijk
>> The Netherlands
>> http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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>> RCom-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/rcom-l
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> "Truth is much too complicated to allow
> anything but approximations."
>                              :: John von Neumann
> --------------------------------------------------------------
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