Flexibility in wiki publishing: author desires, peer review and citation

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First Author: John Schmidt^[1]
Additional authors: If you have suggestions, please place them on the discussion page. If you want to be a co-author of this article, feel free to request that I designate you as a co-author.
Note: I intend to quickly slap this article together so that it can be used as an example for peer review.

Abstract. This article is concerned with anticipating the practical issues that will arise within the new field of wiki academic publishing. This article is intended to serve as a test case for technical problems that will arise during the wiki publishing process. The major issue addressed in this article is the desirability of flexibility in wiki publishing. Historically, authors have been forced to conform to restrictions imposed by printed media and these constraints on publishing have typically been extended to conventional electronic journals. Wiki publishing offers opportunities for shaping the publishing process to meet the needs of authors and facilitate intellectual activity. The value of flexibility in publishing systems will be discussed in the context of the different types of publications that arise within academic sub disciplines, in particular primary research articles, topical reviews, and peer reviews. A secondary topic of this article is flexibility to accommodate the needs of reviewers who are conducting peer review. New kinds of incentives will be needed in wiki publishing to encourage peer review. It is suggested that when traditional incentives are abandoned, the peer review process can be aligned with the goal of making peer review an activity that is engaged in only for the purpose of providing fair and open evaluations of published work. Traditionally, peer review happens before publication. Peer review can have two phases during the wiki publishing process, an initial phase equivalent to traditional pre-publishing peer review and a second phase that continues indefinitely, after formal publication. Finally, this article concludes with discussion of the need for a user-friendly and universal system for creating and tracking citations to articles published in wiki format.

Introduction

During the past few weeks, I have placed some of my preliminary ideas about wiki academic publishing at the Protoscience wikicity and at Meatball wiki^[2]. With the creation of the Academic Publishing Wiki^[3] it is now time to begin the process of implementing a working system for academic publishing that will use the wiki interface.

This article is intended to serve as a test case for the steps involved in wiki academic publishing. There are many possible systems for wiki publishing, but for the purposes of this article I will restrict discussion to a simple three step process.

1. Initial construction and preparation of an article for publishing in a wiki format.
2. An initial round of peer review prior to “formal publishing” in a journal.
3. Formal publication of the peer-reviewed article in a wiki journal and what happens after “formal publishing”.

This article is being constructed in a wiki environment in order to allow other users of the Academic Publishing wikicity to be aware of progress being made in the preparation of this article. Also, during this "preliminary draft" phase, other users can comment on the developing content of the article. I have also invited others to request co-authorship of this article if they want to contribute to its construction. Such benefits of authoring an article in a community wiki environment may be off-set by the possibility of theft of intellectual ideas. Some authors who are particularly concerned about getting credit for their intellectual activity may prefer to write in a non-public environment. A good system of time-stamping text that is added to wiki databases could provide a system for establishing priority.

Many academicians work within research or lab groups where there is a free flow of ideas and it is often difficult to trace the origin of good ideas to individuals. Open publishing in a wiki format will continue to expand the ethic of community discovery. Academicians will continue to find ways to new ways to receive credit for their efforts within distributed communities. Formal acknowledgements from communities of individual contributions to community efforts can play an important role in encouraging individuals to openly share their ideas.

The wide range of differences in the needs and desires of various authors should be taken as incentive for creating a system for wiki publishing that is flexible and able to accommodate the needs of different authors as they seek to publish various types of articles. Some of the issues related to the diversity in author needs that can be accommodated by wiki publishing is explored in the next section.

Flexibility to accommodate authors

A distributed and flexible wiki publishing system would provide many publishing options for authors. Traditional journals often start the publishing process when a draft of an article is submitted for formal peer review. One author or a small group of authors typically write a complete article and then submit it to a traditional journal. In contrast, traditional wiki publishing often involves a community effort to construct a document by many successive edits made possible by a wiki user interface. These two ways of constructing a document can be viewed as two extremes along a continuum. By restricting who can edit a new article and by providing opportunities for interested parties to comment on- and contribute to articles that are under construction, a wide range of options become available for constructing documents that will be subjected to peer review. It should be up to each author to decide how an article will be produced and prepared for peer review. Individual journals for wiki publishing could impose their own standards, and authors would be free to use the journals that suit their personal needs.

Many different types of articles are possible in wiki publishing, and each type may be best accommodated by a different combination of restrictions on how an article is generated. By keeping all of the steps of document preparation secret and only allowing secret peer review prior to publication, a wiki journal could replicate traditional publishing practices. An article produced in secret and subjected to secrete review could be published in a wiki environment where it would then become a target for wiki format discussion. In a wiki environment that allows derivative works, copies of the original article could be edited and modified in the traditional wiki way.

Open authoring

Why might authors consider constructing articles in a wiki environment? One advantage of using a wiki interface for article construction is that a good document history tracking system could keep track of the contributions of multiple authors and be used to assure that only actual authors are credited as authors. Such tracking of author contributions could be coupled to a strong cultural preference within wiki publishing for acknowledging contributions to intellectual works other than the actual authoring of articles. If the detailed history of who actually writes articles is available, then the questionable practice of listing “honorary authors” who do not actually write articles could be diminished in wiki publishing. As an example of the importance of acknowledging contributions of non-authors, this article has an Acknowledgements section.

Open authoring also could allow interested parties to observe the stages by which articles are constructed. One advantage of this would be for historical analysis of how ideas arise through intellectual activity. Another benefit of writing in an open environment is that it can encourage collaboration. People with useful suggestions can make comments on a project that is under development. If the original author finds those comments useful and insightful, a collaboration might ensue. Additionally, an author composing an article within a wiki publishing community might have a stray question about some point of information, post that question to a journal’s community bulletin board, receive a useful reply, and simply acknowledge the help of community members in the final publication.

Primary literature articles in wiki publishing

Secondary literature articles in wiki publishing

Open review

Traditional peer review is almost entirely a secretive process. What are the advantages of open peer review?

When should peer review take place in a wiki publishing system? Anytime. Various journals can set rules for the level of peer review that is required before official publication. Some journals will decide that “official publication” is a useless distinction; a remnant of print publishing. As soon as text hits the wiki server, it is published. The whole basis of peer review before publishing arose by historical accident from the limitations of print media. When publishing was expensive, it made sense to only publish pre-approved articles. In wiki publishing, publishing is cheap and easy and pre-approval is an artificial barrier to the free expression of new ideas. Post-publishing peer review can provide the required screening of articles. Within a system where peer review follows publication, authors seeking prolonged participation in an intellectual community will have still incentive to not publish garbage.

A potential problem for open publishing is dealing with the volume of published articles. The first and most natural way of dealing with volume issues is to have a distributed system with compartmentalized specialty journals. Journals will compete to develop communities of members with common interests who will define a range of topics that they are interested in. Authors will seek their peers and gravitate towards journals where they can get useful peer review and other beneficial peer interactions.

The new risk from open publishing is spam. Each journal that is involved with wiki publishing will have to develop and maintain a list of known spammers and make information about known spammers available to other journals. Many journals will require authenticated information about authors before allowing them to participate in wiki publishing. Other more open journals may only require basic user registration and have rules for blocking access to page editing is a user is identified as a spammer.

The importance of fringes

Most working academicians are locked into the existing system of conventional peer review and cannot risk exploring wiki publishing. It is not uncommon for new ideas to first flourish among fringe groups who are less committed to existing ways of doing things and which contain people who are looking for new and better ways of doing things. People at the fringes of conventional academia will disproportionately be interested in wiki publishing. At its earliest stages of development, wiki publishing should be particularly open to amateurs who seek to participate in academic pursuits. Picture a modern day [Charles Darwin] or the world’s leading expert in development of the wiki user interface who may be a young computer programmer with no academic credentials. It would be crazy to exclude such people from wiki publishing. These are exactly the kinds of people who will be likely to first participate in wiki publishing. Wiki publishing at the fringes of academia is a path towards developing and validating wiki publishing, eventually leading to a stable system that will be easy for mainstream academicians to adopt.

Tools and Utilities

While there are advantages to constructing articles in a wiki environment, wiki interfaces such as Mediawiki currently have many limitations. For example, the lack of spelling and grammar checking and the non-intuitive text and image formatting need to be addressed in future upgrades of wiki user interfaces. Until such deficiencies in the wiki interface are removed, many authors will want to continue using conventional software such as word processors for the construction of articles. It is important that there we readily available and efficient utilities for converting documents such as word processor documents into wiki format. Some converters already exist for this purpose (example).

Unfortunately, there are many different wiki formats. Given the popularity of Wikipedia, a case can be made that Mediawiki has a reasonable chance for development and future upgrades. Wikicities uses Mediawiki and the Academic Publishing wikicity is a place where initial experiments can begin aimed towards producing a standard for wiki publishing.

Facilitating useful peer review

Peer review articles in wiki publishing They are articles, subject to their own review. This will promote fair peer review. Shoddy reviews will themselves be subject to review. Some people might specialize in producing good reviews. Credit and rewards for quality peer review. Payment system?

Rating system for peer review

More complex scales are possible but a basic system of negative, neutral and positive might be adequate if weighted according the amount of text in a review.

The importance of journals

Journals engaged in wiki publishing will be communities working in support of a particular type of intellectual activity.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Helmut Leitner, Zbigniew Lukasiak, Sunir Shah and others at Meatball wiki for stimulating discussions about the challenges of wiki publishing.

Thanks to Owen Lloyd for founding the Academic Publishing wikicity and putting an end to dithering.

References

1. ^  John Schmidt is registered with Wikicities as --JWSchmidt 22:44, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
2. ^  Useful discussions of wiki publishing at Meatball wiki; see particularly the page about Wiki Science Publication.
3. ^  The URL for the Academic Publishing Wiki is http://academia.wikicities.com.

This article is a working preliminary draft, NOT yet submitted for peer review. Leave your comments on the discussion page (talk page) or contact the First Author, [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]], at [[User talk:{{{1}}}|their talk page]] or by [[Special:Emailuser/{{{1}}}|email]].