User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/COASP 2010/Notes

Background

(CC) Image: Public Library of Science
Do journals provide sufficient contextualization for research?

For technical reasons, publishing was historically a separate step, performed about once per iteration of the research cycle

Publishing every relevant bit of information immediately at each step is technically feasible now, and the remaining hurdles are cultural ones.

Wikis allow for systematic linking and thus enhanced contextualization (sidenote: some have argued that links are distracting)

Overview of the evolution of wikis and wiki-like environments

Mentions MediaWiki plugin for Wordpress

Etherpad

Google Docs

Dear Scientists, Stop Duplicating Work

Wikis as platforms for science communication

Wikis can be used, in principle, for any aspect of scholarly communication, as detailed in this comparison of wiki- and paper-based communication systems and the related blog post.

Examples exist for all steps of the research cycle, except successful applications to major funders (see this overview for some attempts)

Benchmark: English Wikipedia

Top 10 Reasons Why Academics Should Edit Wikipedia

Wikis as platforms for scholarly publishing

(CC) Image: Encyclopedia of Earth
Encyclopedia of Earth — a wiki with overview articles reviewed by experts, available under CC-BY-SA

The idea is not new — WikiSciencePublication stated in 2006:

"Somewhere at the fringe of science, someone will start using wiki publishing for science publishing."

Most variants of wiki software can handle user rights in great detail, so as to allow implementation of basically any kind of peer-review system

Lab reports: Lab reports

Conferences: Stand-alone site / contextualized schedule / talks, contextualized talks and Posters (possibly also as clickable imagemaps, like here), presentations

Research papers: Accompanied by wiki article (progress report), contextualized on-wiki, links to wikis amongst other sources, integrated into database

Review articles: Scholarly / Outreach

Wikis can act as publication filters for new research

Books

References

Publication lists (incl. supplementary materials and in principle direct links to the raw data)

To-do lists for a whole discipline

Wikis as platforms for Open Access publishing

The majority of wiki platforms are open access by default

Stresses the re-use part of CC licenses (e.g. for images) — an aspect of OA publishing that does not receive much attention outside research blogs (cf. detailed discussion with respect to the American Physical Society, arxiv and Quantiki, and the final outcome: APS authors keep copyright over derivative works). While the main purpose of such licensing is certainly to make the research available to other specialists working in the field, they also make the research available to scientists from other fields (not just in academia) as well as non-scientists (teachers, entrepreneurs, media, patient groups or hobbyists).

Examples: Gyrification, Surface-based morphometry and Chordoma

Also note that Fig. 3 of http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/neuro.11.025.2009 and Fig. 2(III) of http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2010.00020 explain the same thing, original to neither papers

Incompatibility of wikis and closed-access publishing

re-use of CC-BY-SA content in copyrighted papers

Quality assessment

In principle, any system of peer review can be implemented on a wiki, by detailed management of user rights: The usual single-blind as well as double-blind or open peer review, with the reviewers or even authors always or optionally, temporarily or permanently remaining anonymous, with simple accept/ revise/ reject decisions or interactive two-stage or multi-stage discussions, in public or hidden from it (possibly even in part), before and/ or after formal publication.

Some wiki examples:

Some non-wiki examples:

Business models

Main ones: author-pays, (partial) subscription, philanthropy, advertising, premium services

Opportunities

Article-specific Job ads (e.g. via subpages)
Wiki for Calls For Papers
Post-publication peer review: Faculty of 1000, The Third Reviewer, Rejecta Mathematica
Wiki export, or standardized XML or HTML output that could be imported to a wiki via some xml2wiki or similar converters
Image search (example) and annotation
Search by license (prototypes: journals, images)