Grants:Simple/Applications/WikiJournal User Group/2022/annual plan

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

Continuing the efforts given in the WikiJournal User Group 2021 annual plan, 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

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 Between July 1 and October 15, 2021, there were were 12 new articles submitted and 4 new articles published. The user group if finalizing the hiring of technical editors to assist for example with the processing of accepted articles. After the completed hiring of them, WikiJournal User Group will be more efficient in handling a higher submission rate of articles. In 2022, 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.

Community support and administrative growth

Improving accessibility and streamlining procedures

Objectives The user group will continue 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. Such tools may be useful across multiple wiki-related platforms.

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).

Next steps 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 January 1 to Dec 31, 2022, WikiJournal User Group 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 The 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 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. 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. It is valuable to ensure visibility within the movement for when members of those groups are in contact with relevant third parties.

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).

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.