Grants:Simple/Applications/WikiJournal User Group/2024/annual plan

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

Furthering the efforts in the previous WikiJournal User Group annual plans, the project will continue its mission to publish scholarly works with no cost for the authors, apply quality checks on submissions by expert academic peer review, and make accepted works available online free of charge in perpetuity.

Content contribution and community growth

Objectives

High-quality, peer-reviewed and open access scholarly works with no cost for the authors in perpetuity.

Both articles intended for Wikipedia-integration and those intended to be stand-alone remain high priorities, as each provide unique value to both the Wikimedic and academic ecosystems.

Current situation

The journals continue to have a healthy number of submissions, both written from scratch and submitted via the preprints server, and direct from Wikipedia. However, the submission rate remains higher than the peer review rate, leading to delays in processing and affects author experience. This is a common problem for all academic publications, however the WikiJournals have some unique features that may affect this. Affiliation with Wikipedia reported by several peer reviewers as the reason they agreed to provide reviews; diamond OA format may also encourage peer reviews. Disadvantages: Limited name recognition and rare repeat reviewing (very few submissions are sufficiently similar that the same peer reviewer would be suitable twice). A concerted effort has been made to specifically target effort on older articles in review to assist them through the review process, which has cleared much of this backlog for WikiJournal of Medicine and WikiJournal of Science. Additionally, a key ratio is the number of active editorial board members to the number of in-progress articles, and this ratio is particularly skewed for WikiJournal of Humanities, leading to especially extended times. WikiJournal of Medicine has seen a higher number than usual of desk rejections for low quality. This is not a problem in itself, but does flag the need for greater outreach to potential authors to ensure there remain also an appropriate number of high quality submissions.

Next steps

It is particularly important to rejuvenate the editorial board of WikiJournal of Humanities, since the majority of the work falls on relatively few. As part of this, we will be launching a small recruitment campaign amongst existing Wikimedia contributors with academic backgrounds in the arts, humanities, and social sciences (per inclusion of ORCiDs in their user pages), as well as by the existing editors to colleagues with no Wikimedia experience but OA interests. Though this effort will be particularly focused for WikiJHum, The other journals will benefit from additional efforts in this as well to ensure a flow of new editors. This will be a slightly higher priority for all journals than outreach to potential authors so as to make sure the submissions-to-editors ratio doesn't get too high. Additional professionalisation of the journals through further indexing will also enable article submission by potential contributors who need to only submit articles to journals indexed by particular services (which index is most important varies by institution). The priority next index to apply to for both WikiJSci and WikiJMed will be Web of Science.

Community support and administrative growth

Improving accessibility and streamlining procedures

Objectives

Accessible editing tools, streamlined procedures, and efficient use of contributor time and improves the quality of the outputs.

Requirements to understand wikimarkup will be 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 will be more consistent and simple
Formatting of articles will be more clear and consistent

Current situation

The user group is finalizing the hiring of technical editors to 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). Employer coverage coverage has been attained, and proper employment contracts are being developed for the purpose. 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). Onboarding, training, and organisation of a pool of technical editors has been extremely useful to ensuring time-sensitive administrative tasks are not missed or delayed. Implementation of technical infrastructure through Workmarket platform has also enabled us to be truly country-agnostic when paying for contract work, particularly technical editors.

Next steps

Further 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). This will require contacting a new pool of potential developers, as sufficient familiarity with the necessary systems has held up previous attempts. Further increasing the automation of writing data to wikidata will also greatly help the depth of our metadata in wikidata.

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

The increasing use of wikidata has continued for organising the activities of the user group. This has enabled the reuse of that data for e.g. formatting articles and populating volumes via LUA modules and queries for process monitoring and summary statistics.

Next steps

Building on this via existing or proposed technologies should include:

Fuller integration with Scholia will be useful, especially for applications where incomplete data coverage isn't misleading (e.g. identifying potential peer reviewers, suggesting other articles with similar keywords)
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)
Work with mediawiki developer community to understand the best ways of working, (e.g. via greater engagement with phabricator or 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

The goal over the upcoming years is to attract a continued growth of participants, in editorial board as well as authors and peer reviewers. This year we have resumed in-person outreach at a number of events: EduWiki Conference 2023 in Serbia in May, Wikimania 2023 in Singapore in August, and open access week in late October in partnership with Wikimedia Colombia. We also presented our project virtually in collaboration with Wikimedia Ukraine to the Wiki Community Educators Conference in July. These activities have successfully increased the number of subject matter experts volunteering to serve in WikiJournal editorial boards. Furthermore, these events are expected to introduce new editors to wiki collaboration through a targeted approach aimed at educators, 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 WikiJournals for reporting on peer-reviewed articles.

Next steps

WikiJournal expects to continue presentation at symposia and conferences. Where possible, presentations that reach non-Wikimedia audiences will be prioritised, since bringing in subject matter experts who otherwise would not have contributed to a Wikimedia project remains a key focus (however key Wikimedia conferences will still need to be attended). It will continue its activities on social media (Facebook and X/Twitter accounts linked from Wikiversity:WikiJournal User Group/Contact). Within Wikimedia, stronger ties are being built with WikiEdu and thematic affiliates (especially Wiki Project Med, Wikipedia & Education User Group and Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network User Group) as well as geographical user groups and chapters. It is especially valuable to ensure visibility within the movement for when members of those groups are in contact with relevant third parties.

We aim to have physical presence at Wikimania 2024 in Katowice, Poland. This will provide a good networking opportunity to outreach our projects and potential editors (as demonstrated in Wikimania 2023). Furthermore, we will use the opportunity to continue to advocate for the successful resolution to the WikiJournal's proposal to become a sister project.

There will also be increased support for authors to make non-technical summaries for publications, to maximise accessibility to a wide readership where possible for at least the basic elements of even complex articles. This may involve experimentation with generative large language models to formulate plain language synopsis to present to authors to be used either as a starting point or a jumping off point for them to draft something from scratch.

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 core journals in the group, the proposed WikiJournal of Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences (proposal & vote) was placed on extended pause whilst key proponents were unable to engage with the project for a period of time.

Next steps

It will be valuable to deepen ties with PLOS since their migration of the PLOS topic pages format from their current custom wiki over to a space within wikiversity (and eventually a potential sister project). They are especially interested in experimenting with 'living review articles' where versioning and updating can continue after initial publication. The potential launch of the in Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences journal will need to be revisited now that the key drivers of that proposal are able to re-engage in the process.