Grants:Project/Rapid/WikiJournal 2018

The goal of WikiJournal User Group is to publish scholarly works with no cost for the authors, apply quality checks on submissions by expert peer review, and make accepted works available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity. It applies academic peer review to their content. WikiJournals emphasize transparency throughout the publication process, from peer review to the final version. Thereby, WikiJournal encourages editors to not only summarize existing human knowledge, but also to build upon it. Also, WikiJournals acquire articles containing media (such as images) to enrich Wikipedia articles. It uses an open-access academic publishing model, which scholars and academics may be more familiar with, and so provides citable, indexed articles.

The scenario

Wikipedia lacks information.
Wikipedia is viewed with suspicion by the academic community.
Original research cannot be published on Wikipedia.
Lack of quality images for articles.
Lack of contributions from academic community.
Academic authors often seek recognition more than a mere mention of the history tab of the article.
Lack of standard procedure to maintain notability parameters of an article.

Possible solution

The Wikipedian community and the academic community can be converged and unified through a journal initiative under the Wikimedia banner. The journals needs to adhere to international guidelines and standard procedures in addition to being open access and editable by all. WikiJournal can provide a prototype based on which journals for various themes and subjects can be built upon.

Project Plan

Activities

1. Tell us how you'll carry out your project.

This grant is to cover the expenses of WikiJournal User Group through 2018. From the previous grant (the report for which can be found here), the project has grown from WikiProject Medicine (that only covers medical topics) to a multi-journal organization engaging people from many different fields. Both the WikiJournal of Science (WikiJSci.org and the WikiJournal of Humanities also have established editorial boards, and the article submission system has been adapted to work for each WikiJournal. Further details can be found at WikiJournal User Group/Activity report May 2016 to Dec 2017, and the WikiJournal meta page.

2. How will you let your community know about the event? Please paste links below to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions.

We are spreading the word about this project in WikiProjects such as WikiProject Medicine. We reach out to individual users about ways to contribute, and make occasional entries in the Signpost.

3. Do you have experienced Wikimedia editors to lead the event?

WikiJournal of Medicine engages an editorial board of 9 medical experts, as well as numerous authors to write the medical content, in addition to reviewers with credentials in those fields. WikiJournal of Science likewise attracts experts in their fields. WikiJournal of Humanities is starting up, with a provisional board with expertise in humanities and social sciences.

4. Do participants have the equipment or skills needed to participate and contribute high quality content? If not, how will you support them?

Technically, authors now have a common WikiJournal Preprints system for article submissions. Regarding skills, the editorial boards are composed of people with the expertise to make decisions in the fields of each journal:

5. How will you engage participants after the event(s)?

The WikiJournals are always welcoming additional participants.

6. Is there anything else you want to tell us about this project?

It is fully aligned with the direction of Wikimedia in building communities of contributors from various academic fields. It also builds a new infrastructure for participation, creating content that is useful for multiple Wikimedia sister projects.

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets:

A gradual increase in the number of submissions to the WikiJournals.
An increase in the number of users finding their way to the project by means of DOI links. This impact can can be reflected in the number of articles published, amount of material integrated into Wikipedia, growth of editorial board and mentions in the media.
Discussion, review and criticism of the journal in external media, both online and offline.
Various measures of impact, with detailed measures for WikiJournal of Medicine at: WikiJournal of Medicine/Citation metrics. It includes using both direct and indirect metrics of journal performance, i.e. indirect measures like impact factor by tracking the number of citations / references of the articles published in this journal being made in academic works other than within the journal, alongside other direct measures of impact.
Tracking the number of wiki pages where text from the journal is used and attributed. The journal carries an open license and so the images and text can be directly incorporated in Wikipedia articles or in other Wikimedia projects.
Specific numeric targets include: We strive to publish at least 10 peer reviewed articles in each WikiJournal next year, and recruit at least 3 additional members to each editorial board.

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

$610 in remaining funds for the budget year of 2017, see Grants:Project/Rapid/WikiJournal of Medicine/Report, dedicated to:

Prize competition, to be paid early 2018: $400
COPE membership fee, initially intended to be paid for membership 2017, but they didn't accept applications when our grant was accepted: $210

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense and include a total amount.

$275: Crossref membership, which gives us the tool to give doi codes to all articles of all included journals. This allows external sites and journals to cite these works with a link that always directs to the article, even if the URL changes.

$57: Domain fees for WikiJMed.org (WikiJournal of Medicine), WikiJSci.org (WikiJournal of Science), and WikiJHum.org (WikiJournal of Humanities), each costing $19 per year.

$400 ($50 x 8): Targeted promotion of key posts (especially on Facebook). Posts can be specifically targeted at demographics likely to be interested in the endeavour. (This was proposed as an optional budget line, as a worthwhile investment in boosting the journals' profiles in key audiences)

Total amount: $732

Endorsements

Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!

Support --Marshallsumter (talk) 20:25, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
Support - I support this innovative project which has had significant impact and outputs so far. Ear-phone (talk) 20:28, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
Support - Because it's a modest, well-justified budget for a worthy and so far fruitful cause. --Felipe (talk) 20:55, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
Support - I similarly support this. I think that the content return on investment for WikiJournals is some of the best available. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 11:21, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
Support - The stated expenses are essential ones and this new prototype is flourishing steadily ever since its advent. I also think that the community participation would grow further and eventually it would develop as a sister project. I therefore support this grant application. Diptanshu💬 23:55, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
Support - I strongly support this project for the greater reason that its a community driven and has not APCs for publication and for access. Its truly Open Access. Gutam2000 (talk) 05:04, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Excellent and inspiring Jacknunn (talk) 03:41, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Participants

Volunteer Help in Open Peer Review. Gutam2000 (talk) 05:36, 6 November 2017 (UTC)