Grants:Simple/Applications/WikiJournal User Group/2021/annual plan

WikiJournal User Group
Open access • Publication charge free • Public peer review • Wikipedia-integrated

New summaries or explanations are not required for any continuing programs from the previous grant that have no or minimal changes, and can be linked to a previous proposal for reference.
2000-word limit recommended. If you have an annual plan already prepared for other purposes that is over 2000 words, this is satisfactory, and it is not necessary to prepare a separate one for your Simple APG application. Please clearly indicate any new programs or changes from last year.

Content contribution and community growth

Objectives

WikiJournal will strive to keep its goal of publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed and open access scholarly works with no cost for the authors in perpetuity. It will keep applying open academic peer review to its content.

Current situation

2020 had 15 new articles, and the project expects to see an increase in the annual amount of article publications. In 2021, it will continue to constitute a publishing group of open access, peer reviewed academic journals that integrate their content into Wikipedia where possible. WikiJournals dual-publish accepted articles to create both a stable, version of record, and also integrate suitable information into Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This improves the accuracy of the encyclopedia, and rewards authors with citable, indexed publications with much greater reach than traditional scholarly publishing.

Next steps

Creating more Wikipedia-integrated articles will help improve both the quality of and trust in Wikipedia as a place to access free information. Several article formats will keep being published, including broad review articles that become Wikipedia pages (either written from scratch, or adapted from existing Wikipedia pages), focused review articles that may be used to update just one section of a Wikipedia page, multimedia articles that are used to enrich Wikipedia articles, and original research. WikiJournals will keep emphasizing transparency throughout the publication process, from peer review to the final version. Thereby, WikiJournals encourage editors to not only summarize existing human knowledge, but also to build upon it. WikiJournals will keep using an open-access academic publishing model, which scholars and academics may be more familiar with, and so provides citable, indexed articles. It will thus keep generating both quality content and increased participation in Wikimedia projects.

Attracting new contributors will depend on both direct contact to potential contributors (email templates). Topics that either missing or stub/start in Wikipedia will continue to prioritised be for invitations to submit articles, whereas original research submissions will have to be attracted as spontaneous submissions (and occasionally sought case-by-case). Similarly, new potential editorial board members can be sought from open-access-interested expert communities. In addition, the work of members of the WikiJournals Editorial teams on the multi-organisational project 'Standardised Data on Initiatives' (STARDIT) provides more ways for people to be acknowledged as contributors to Wikimedia content, providing people accessing information with more data about who has created content.

Community support and administrative growth

Improving accessibility and streamlining procedures

Objectives

Improving the accessibility of editing tools will enable more people to be involved, while streamlining procedures maximises the efficiency of contributor time and improves the quality of the outputs by reducing human error

Requirements to understand wikimarkup is reduced (and ideally eliminating) for contributors, making using the interface more accessible to more people
Editorial tracking and processing of articles through peer review and publication is consistent and simple
Formatting of articles is clear and consistent

Current situation

In additional to making visualeditor the standard for new users on WV (discussion & vote), members of the group are also testing the reply tool (discussion & vote).

A current key part of the technical infrastructure consists of hiring technical editors. These support participants in behind-the-scenes technical tasks in processing of articles through peer review and publication to greatly increase efficiency and enhance contributor retention. Since this role have variable workload, but that work is usually highly time-sensitive, the community agreed to allow the role to be covered by 6 people with workload dynamically distributed between them (discussion & vote). The user group is already in the process of fulfilling requirements for hiring people (under the jurisdiction of Connecticut where the project is officially based), including finding employer coverage, and providing for required sexual harassment training. They are also physically located in the United States in order to simplify tax filing and other administration. Proper employment contracts are being developed for the purpose. Administration of taxes are also expected. WikiJournal has also, by community vote, approved a Human Resources volunteer to oversee the onboarding of the new employees, and their continued employment (discussion & vote).

Next steps

Further reducing wikimarkup requirements on talkpages will be vital for peer review comments and author responses. A notable gap is that although reviewer comments are submitted via google form, currently author responses still have to be done via wikimarkup. Additionally, being able to easily automatically visually distinguish between comments by different contributor roles would be highly valuable (currently manually done by templates).

Integration with a back end editorial management system will be highly valuable to cover functions that cannot be done on-wiki (likely with Open Journal Systems, see discussions 1, 2 and proposal).

Content input via pageforms or similar would be generally highly useful, especially if integrated with wikidata (read and write)

In the timeframe of July 1 to Dec 31, 2021, WikiJournal will potentially also complete the administrative system for having a paid Chief Executive Officer. The framework (including Bylaws modifications, responsibilities and guidelines) and subsequent election of a paid Chief Executive Officer will be approved by voting in the WikiJournal community. The Chief Executive Officer will report to the administrative board of WikiJournal. If this will be completed before a subsequent grant, the payment of a Chief Executive Officer will be shared with the technical editors, so as to amount to a total workload of no more than 1 FTE.

Currently, the project does not have the infrastructure to hire persons outside the US (in technical editor and other roles). WikiJournal would like to have the ability to hire persons from outside the US, since the user group is international in scope, but does not foresee this happening in the near future with the current infrastructure.

Building a robust technical infrastructure

Objectives

Technical infrastructure is in need of constant improvement to make processes efficient and robust.

Information is stored in one location and then synchronised across to anywhere else necessary
Information is machine readable and API-accessible (initially metadata, but eventually also article contents). This includes aligning with STARDIT to ensure such meta-data is compatible with existing partner organisations, such as Cochrane
Information is as in-depth as possible, with minimal additional effort or complication to users

Current situation

In 2020, there was a large-scale reorganisation to host article metadata in Wikidata, including

Article metadata for each journal (via template:article info), articles in review, editors, articles integrated to and/or from Wikipedia

Next steps

Building on this via existing or proposed technologies should include:

Populating additional page content from wikidata (e.g. main pages, volumes, editor lists, statistics).
- List generation for volumes could be achieved by activating existing tools (e.g. listeriabot)
- Greater depth of metadata could be achieved via STARDIT (test implementation on wikispore using pageforms)
- Content input via pageforms if integrated with wikidata would be generally highly useful
- Fuller integration with Scholia (Articles, authors, editors, reviewers, potentially keyword topics) after audit to ensure non-misleading coverage
Test run richer citation metadata (shared citations CiTO / Scite.ai citation taxonomy)
Frictionless conversion (as far as possible) between Mediawiki-PDF-LaTeX-MSword
Advocating for a sister project platform (application still under consideration by the WMF board of trustees)
Consider a funded and more organised bug bounty / most wanted feature list on phabricator (if properly advertised, and possibly integrated with hackathons)

Outreach, awareness and partnerships

Getting the word out

Objectives

We must be more inclusive and ensure that potential contributors are supported to get involved

Current situation

2020 saw 12 new editorial board members and volunteer associate editors, up to a total of about 60 people in total. The the goal over the upcoming years is to attract a continued growth of participants at all levels. This is expected to introduce new editors to wiki collaboration, and thereby participation in other Wikimedia Foundation projects as well. Good relations exist with the WikiEdu foundation (with relevance to students and particularly course organisers), though these have not yet translated into increased contributions through those channels. The work of members of the WikiJournal Editorial team on STARDIT has resulted in multiple invitations to speak about at conferences (including the WikiCite conference) and a number of podcasts. People from organisations including Cochrane and Johns Hopkins University have been working with members of the WikiJournal Editorial team (including the Strategy Liaison) to look at ways of adopting the meta-data standards being developed by the WikiJouranls for reporting on peer-reviewed articles.

Next steps

WikiJournal expects multiple presentations and media mentions, including presence the virtual Wikimania 2021. This will continue similar activities from past years, such as at the Wikicite 2020 conference. It will continue its activities on social media (Facebook and Twitter accounts linked from Wikiversity:WikiJournal User Group/Contact. Within Wikimedia, stronger ties will be needed with existing user groups and chapters. Although not hugely likely to directly result in increased contributions or contributors, it is valuale to ensure visibility within the movement for when members of those groups are in contact with relevant third parties.

There are also other specialist academic, librarianship and research support conferences that would be ideal outreach venues.

Improved video content could be particularly valuable for social media (again focussing mainly outside existing wikimedia contributors).

Work on STARDIT will continue to strengthen connections with existing partner organisations and foster new partnerships with multiple organisations around the world.

Additional journals

There are often opportunities for additional narrow-scope journals in the current academic publishing environment.

In addition to existing journals (medicine, science and humanities), the project aims to cautiously initiate journals in additional fields. Caution is taken to ensure that there is a critical mass of contributors before spinning up a new journal to avoid potential for stalling (guidelines). This is because there is a fair amount of setup work involved, both on- and off-wiki, however if these criteria seem met.

Current situation

In addition to the three currently running, broad scope journals (Medicine, Science, Humanities), there is an ongoing process in initiating a journal in Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences (proposal & vote). Two other earlier proposed journals have stalled (French-language version, business).

Next steps

In additional to journals fully run by members of the WikiJournal User Group, there are potential synergies to be had by inviting PLOS topic pages format to move form their current custom wiki over to the relevant space within wikiversity (and eventually a potential sister project). This could enable combined efforts in development and maintenance as well as policy and practice.