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Grants:Simple/Applications/WikiJournal User Group/2021

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

WikiJournal User Group is a publishing group of open-access, free-to-publish, Wikipedia-integrated academic journals. <seo title=" WJM, WikiJMed, Wiki.J.Med., WikiJMed, Wikiversity Journal User Group, WikiJournal WikiMed, Free to publish, Open access, Open-access, Non-profit, online journal, Public peer review "/>

Application or grant stage: approved
Applicant or grantee: applicant
Amount requested: US$56,500.00
Amount granted: US$40,000
Funding period: 1 July 2021 – 31 December 2021
Midpoint report: 15 October 2021
Final report due: Jan 31 2022 (YEAR + 30 days)

Application

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Background

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Annual Plan

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Annual plan 2021

Budget Plan

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Budget plan 2021 (Note this budget plan applies to July 1 – Dec 31 2021. Thereafter, funding applications will be made in November to synchronise finances with the calendar year)

Staffing Plan

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Staffing plan 2021

Strategic plan

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The WikiJournal User Group is in the process of potentially becoming a Sister Project within the Wikimedia Foundation, as a platform to host journal content as one of its strategic goals:

See also 3-year plan 2021-2024

Introduction

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The WikiJournal User Group is a community of editors with a thematic focus on bridging the gap between the Wikimedia projects and academic communities. The primary method is through organising a group of peer reviewed scholarly journals. These journals have a strong focus in integrating content into Wikimedia projects, primarily into Wikipedia, Wikicommons, Wikiversity, and Wikidata, according to inclusion criteria and standards of the target wikis. These journals also follow a wiki way of working with a focus on openness, transparency, community input and decision, and zero-cost, open-access publishing. These activities draw input from users who would typically not contribute time and knowledge to Wikimedia projects (both providing content directly as authors, as well as giving deep assessment and feedback as reviewers). The user group is organised into editorial boards with constant email communication and frequent meetings who organise the peer review process, administrate the site, and develop strategy. In addition, members engage in outreach to the research and academic communities through training and editathons at academic conferences, symposia, and other meetings.

The user group has so far been funded using rapid grants since 2017 (reports). Initially these covered necessary subscriptions (e.g. crossref service and COPE membership). In the last year, it has also covered training and a stipend for a 'technical editor' (role description) to assist in necessary technical tasks.

Programs

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Content contribution and community growth

Summary & Relevance

A core activity of the User Group is the publication of articles in the academic journal format. This includes original research and case studies, as well as review articles. Review articles include from-scratch contributions and material submitted across from other Wikimedia projects.

In these activities, accuracy and thorough auditing of information through a formal process is prioritised over number of separate articles. Each new article is therefore typically quite long and highly audited compared to the average new page on a Wikimedia project.

For organisational strategy, this ensures that increased contribution from authors (typically first-time-users) is matched by growth in editors with Wikimedia experience to shepherd them and organise robust peer review. Constant growth in peer-reviewed content raises the profile of the user group and helps reach additional key thresholds for recognition (e.g. PubMed Central indexing).

For movement strategy, this strengthens the WMF's reputation for caring about quality and pushing new models of knowledge equity.

Attraction of content contribution

Objectives

  • Generate unique content from the academic and scholarly communities
  • Generate high-quality content of use to Wikimedia projects
  • Attract content input from contributors (usually one-off: authors and peer reviewers)
  • Attract engagement from repeat interactors (usually ongoing/repeat: editors, members, followers, readers)


Program metrics and targets

  • Number of content pages created and improved: 30
    • Of which, those having content integrated into WP: 15
  • Number of new contributors (author role): 60
  • Number of new contributors (reviewer role): 60
  • Number of new contributors (editor role): 10
    • Of those, outside of N. America + Europe: 8
  • All above metrics gathered via Wikidata
  • Number of new members (mailing list subscribers): 100
  • Number of new followers (soc. media): 100

Community support and administrative growth

There are number of essential and time-critical tasks that need to occur during article processing (e.g. DOI assignment, version-of record typesetting, data preparation, outside communications). Many of these are currently time consuming or fiddly, but ensuring consistent and reproducible handling is of high importance and ensures volunteer time isn't undermined by technical limitations.

For organisational strategy, this ensures a smooth and seamless experience, minimising unnecessary wait times for contributors. This will also build a reputation for timeliness which is particularly important for original research outputs.

For movement strategy, our metadata records on Wikidata can act as templates for best practice in open metadata. The practice of writing scholarly articles directly online, and the building of technical tools to link front-end wiki drafting to a back-end editorial management interface has the potential to see wider uptake in the scholarly publishing community (especially academic societies, and journals in lower-middle income countries).

Objectives

  • Smooth processing and technical handling
  • Updated automation and technology
  • Exemplar Wikidata records and monitoring


Program metrics and targets

  • Technical tasks able to be fully performed by technical editor(s)
    • Recruitment of 1-6 people, corresponding to 1.0 FTE[notes 1] distributed among them.
    • Training (production of materials, and ability for existing tech editor(s) to train new)
  • Have Wikidata store all WJ article-level metadata
  • Have Wikidata sufficiently complete to autogenerate dashboard/reports on:
    • Countries of editors, authors and reviewers
    • Article processing times and stages (per-journal and per-editor?)
    • Content themes
  • Back end editorial management integration of mediawiki↔wikidata↔OJS via APIs


Outreach, awareness and partnerships

The WikiJournal User Group needs to be highly visible outside of the Wikimedia community, since a key aim is to build bridges with international expert communities. It additionally needs to both learn from and share with the Wikimedia community, given its unique capabilities and perspectives.

For organisational strategy, continuously reaching additional potential participants is particularly important, as we rely on a large proportion of first time (and often one-off) Wikimedia contribution from people in author and peer reviewer roles.

For movement strategy, this forwards our shared goals in raising engagement amongst expert contributor communities, which are highly valuable to engage and brining into the movement.

Objectives

  • Awareness within the Wikimedia movement of group's activities
  • Awareness outside of Wikimedia movement of group's activities


Program metrics and targets

  • For non-Wikimedia expert communities
    • Presentation at conferences, symposia,
    • Indexing inclusion
    • Professional memberships
  • Wikimedia affiliate connections (user groups, chapters and thematics orgs), either:
    • have member of affiliate attend a WJ meeting
    • have WJ member attend affiliate meeting
    • Coverage of all affiliates: 50%
  • Wikimedia events, ensure presentaion(s) at:
    • Wikidata con
    • Wikicite
    • Wikimania

Grant Metrics Reporting

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Unified grants metrics spreadsheet

Needs Request

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We have a quite a broad member skillset, and are primarily self-sufficient. However there are several items where the experience of the WMF would be very useful.

Requests for operational support

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  • Public communications: It is always worth improving our professional communications and PR practices. It may also be useful to have WMF support when contacting senior leadership at some academic organisations.
  • Financial practices: Although we have several members with 501c3 experience, it would still be useful to have advice on best accounting software and practices

Midpoint report

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Report of October 15, 2021:

Global metrics

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Between July 1 and October 15, 2021, there were were 12 new articles submitted and 4 new articles published.

WikiJournal of Science attained Scopus indexing.

Program story

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The project has seen new ideas for providing open access knowledge across the world. For example, the project has attracted a Ukrainian WikiJournal proposal. At the latest Zoom meeting on October 1, invited speaker Oleksiy Boldyriev told that in Ukraine, there is a language barrier to publish in international academic journals. Ukrainian language journals can have bad reputation for non-thorough peer review. Therefore he is interested in the WikiJournals open peer reviewed model. Several academics & Wikipedians within Ukrainian community are interested in testing this concept. It was suggested to create a special issue of WikiJournal of Science for Ukrainian research as a test. It may have Ukrainian language with English abstract translations. It would enable interested editors to see how the process works.

Expenses report

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WikiJournal was able to obtain coverage for Management Liability (D&O & EPL) Package, Miscellaneous E&O (Errors and Omissions) and Cyber, which ensures continued operations of the journals in case of for example legal claims. Although it has a certain cost, it is expected to remain the same even after project expansion.

The administration for hiring technical editors has taken longer than expected, with employment agreements being finalized. Subsequently, there have been no salary or payroll service expenses yet. Also, since focus has been given to the onboarding of the tech editors, there has not yet been any back end development expenses.

Detailed expenses by midpoint are given at:

Learning story

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The administrative board has learned the various necessary steps for hiring technical editors. After the completed hiring of them, WikiJournal will be more efficient in handling a higher submission rate of articles, getting closer to its full potential in providing open access academic articles.

Final report

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Notes

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  1. ↑ In WikiJournal, 1 FTE corresponds to 48 hours per week
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