Wikis in scholarly publishing

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Start · Quotes · Background · Wikis as science communication platforms · WikiRepository · Sample_article · WikiJournal · Editorial policies · Obstacles · Outlook · Alternatives · Q & A · Paper · Video

About

This page serves to draft a contribution to a special issue of Services and Use that is dedicated to the APE 2011 conference at which this talk was given. The issue will be Open Access, authors retain copyright, and our drafting the paper on this wiki has been approved by the publisher. In the spirit of wiki collaboration, we invite others to join the drafting. For some sample articles covering earlier APE conferences, see here. Submission deadline is March 15, 2011.

Submission details

  • Submission in online formats is not possible, so we will have to convert the document, perhaps by way of Extension:OpenDocument Export, which would have to be installed and tested before that.

Title

Science as a wiki

Authors

Daniel Mietchen, Gregor Hagedorn, Konrad U. Förstner, Mark Hahnel and Lyubomir Penev

Others are welcome to join in!
See also Template:Publication to wiki notice TESTING.

Abstract

Wikis provide an environment that allows to collect, structure, maintain and update knowledge in a coherent fashion. Their potential for formal publications is insufficiently explored so far. What roles can they play in scientific discourse? What have we learned about their “internal life”? Where do Wikis work – where not? How do wikis relate to “generally accepted knowledge”? And what are the signals that build trust in such results or contributions? How do researchers select and focus contributions: pick up what is new and relevant and skip the irrelevant and redundant? Where do wikis impact publishing, where do they replace it, what can be learned for publishers?

Introduction

Proposal by Gregor:

The processes of science, software developement, scientific publications, and social knowledge organisation have more in common than is generally acknowledged.

  • Science can be seen as a process of hypothesis generation followed by community attempts at falsifying these hypothesis. Much of the best practice codes of science aim at making this process transparent: correct citation of source, clear and reproducable description of methodology, clear separation of cited knowledge from generated new data, open publication in widely disseminated journals. Scientific work in non-open enviroments (such as drug development in the pharmaceutical industry) comes at a significant cost (see Public-Private drug discovery to mitigate such cost, http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110214/full/news.2011.93.html).
  • Software development is a process of proposed improvements to a code base, potentially falsified by automatic testing frameworks or testing by collegues working on the same code base. Open dissemination of methodology (the software code) and the widest possible review (mass review) has proved a successfull method in Open Source software development. Software development in a closed source environment comes at a signficant cost.
  • Scientific publications is a process of sending proposed knowledge contributions, which are formally reviewed by dedicated editors, later by invited reviewers. At this stage, the reviewers often significantly contribute to the quality of the publications by pointing out deficits and errors and giving the original authors and chance to improve the manuscript. Provided the result is satisfying, it is then published for mass review. The result of the mass review, however, is usually not linked back to the publication.
  • Social knowledge organisation on wikis to a large extent mirrors the processes of scientific publications. On platforms like Wikipedia, dedicated (volunatary) editors process the incoming materials, similar to managed journals. Material that is undesirable or clearly below quality standards is removed often within minutes (Quick deletion workflow). Other substandard material is submitted to a one-week process of pointing out errors and requesting improvements and revisions (Requests for deletion workflow). To some extent this process involves expert review, provided experts have organized themselves appropriately (e.g. "Redaktionen" on German Wikipedia - is there an equivalent on en.wikipedia???). While the expert review in Wikipedia may occasionally be substandard, the mass review is highly transparent and all improvements from it immediately improve the quality of the product.

The question discussed in the present article is: which new form of Knowledge organisation and scientific publishing may best combine the lessons learned from these examples?

End of Gregor's ramblings...


Wikis in scholarly communication

Wiki Journal

Main page: WikiJournal.

Editorial policies

Main page: Editorial policies.

add citability

Semantification

Sample article

Wiki Repository

Main page: WikiRepository. See here for an example article. Not just OA "articles" but also suitably licensed blog posts and other stuff.

Business models

Main page: Business models.

Obstacles

Main page: Obstacles.

  • Usability - not everyone has the skills to work with wikisyntax. solution: WYSIWYG modes.
  • Small contributions e.g. to gene annotations are not increasing the considered reputation of scientists yet. An measurement and valuation system is needed.

Alternatives

Main page: Alternatives.

Outlook

Main page: Outlook. Refer to some more Beyond the PDF stuff, especially on data publishing.

References

We will link to online references directly, leaving their metadata in the footnotes as usual. All links shall be archived with WebCite.

Figures

Charges for colour figures apply, for which we do not have funds.

Multimedia

Multimedia embeds shall not be possible on the journal site, but they can be integrated with the paper if hosted elsewhere.

Unsorted

This section contains stuff that may be useful during the writing process. It will be deleted when the article is finished.

  • Scientific reputation building via microcontributions (example)
  • RSS
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