User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/COASP 2010/Notes

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Session start · Talk start · Quotes · Background · Wikis as science communication platforms ·
Wikis as platforms for Open Access publishing · Prototypes · Editorial policies · Guided tour ·
Obstacles · Alternatives · Outlook · Summary · Slides · Video · Q & A · Demo

This page hosts supplementary notes for a talk in the Session on Editorial Innovation in OA Publishing at COASP, August 23, 2010, Prague. I hope it will be useful during the Q & A session and for later reuse.

Wikis as platforms for scholarly publishing

Functions of scholarly publishing

See also this Friendfeed thread.

• Inform about new knowledge
• Archive existing knowledge
• (Make profit)

More detailed listings

Just for reference

• Essential elements of science publishing:
  • Research
  • Documentation
  • Making things public
  • Integration with previous and future knowledge
  • Discussion

• Seven quality indicators to strive for in an ideal peer review system (per Jefferson et al., 2002)

1. importance,
2. usefulness,
3. relevance,
4. methodology,
5. ethics,
6. completeness
7. accuracy of an article
8. accountability (added by Peter Frishauf in part 4)

• Selection, Finance, Organization, Aggregation, Marketing

1. "Selection: it has been said that publishers are better defined by what they do not publish rather than by what they do. A key part of what publishers do lies in the editorial process--selection, acquisition, commissioning."
2. "Finance: publishers take the--sometimes considerable--financial risk in publishing, and can reasonably expect to make a return broadly commensurate with that risk."
3. "Organization: at the core of the publisher's role is the co-ordination of all the developmental processes that turn the author's raw material into a finished product for the market. This is an often-overlooked part of the publisher's art. It perhaps becomes most obvious only by its absence."
4. "Aggregation: it may seem odd to talk about aggregation as being part of a traditional publisher's role, but we would argue that there is nothing new about aggregation of content. The book and journal publishing supply chains are focused on aggregating the works of individual authors--with the ultimate aggregators in the physical world being bookstores and libraries. It is typically to these points of aggregation that consumers go to purchase or borrow the particular item to which they want access."
5. "Marketing: last, perhaps, but certainly not least. Marketing is selfevidently a crucial element of the publisher's role. Here, we mean marketing in its broadest sense ensuring that products are appropriate to the markets for which they are published as well as promoting the products to the markets themselves. In this context, we see marketing as including both customer service and distribution channel management."

• "for practical purposes we can define publishing to include, along with page design and typesetting, the functions of editing, manufacturing, advertising, selling, warehousing, shipping, billing, collection, and other aspects of "valued added" and "Who will keep the gates? How? To what end? (1988)

Quality assessment

Traditionally

Single-blind or double-blind or open peer review, with the reviewers or even authors always or optionally, temporarily or permanently remaining anonymous, with simple accept/ revise/ reject decisions or interactive two-stage or multi-stage discussions, in public or hidden from it (possibly even in part), before and/ or after formal publication.

Some non-wiki examples:

1. Copernicus journals
2. PLoS journals
3. Frontiers journals
4. BMC journals
5. Semantic Web journal
6. Rejecta Mathematics
7. WebMedCentral

• Problems from I hate your paper:

1. Reviewers are biased by personal motives
2. Peer review is too slow, affecting public health, grants, and credit for ideas
3. Too many papers to review

• Respective solutions:

1. Eliminate anonymous peer review ( Biology Direct, BMJ, BMC); run open peer review alongside traditional review (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics); judge a paper based only on scientific soundness, not impact or scope (PLoS ONE)
2. Shorten publication time to a few days (PLoS Currents Influenza); bypass subsequent reviews (Journal of Biology); publish first drafts (European Geosciences Union journals)
3. Recycle reviews from journals that have rejected the manuscript (Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium); wait for volunteers (Chemical Physics Letters); reward reviewer efforts (Biology Direct, BMC, Frontiers, ACP)

• From P≠NP:

P ≠ NP and the future of peer review

Rethinking Peer Review As The World Peer Reviews Claimed Proof That P≠NP

"Apparently, people are realizing that a much more open post-publication peer review process, where anyone can take part, is a lot more effective"

"we have very little evidence that pre-publication closed peer review is any good at any of these things. In a sense, as scientists this should be obvious. You would never make a strong claim based on a very small number of measurements, which rarely come to the same result, and then hide the actual data away where no-one can see it. Yet this is exactly what we do with pre-publication peer review in most cases."

On wiki

In principle, any system of (peer) review can be implemented on a wiki, by detailed management of user rights: The usual

Some wiki examples:

1. English Wikipedia (Flagged Revisions, WikiTrust, Wikipedia:Pending changes)
2. Scholarpedia
3. Encyclopedia of Earth
4. Citizendium

Business models

• Main ones: author-pays, (partial) subscription, philanthropy, advertising, premium services
• Micropayments Science-specific/ general?

Opportunities

• Article-specific Job ads (e.g. via subpages)
• Wiki for Calls For Papers
• Post-publication peer review: Faculty of 1000, The Third Reviewer, Rejecta Mathematica
• Wiki export, or standardized XML or HTML output that could be imported to a wiki via some xml2wiki or similar converters
• Image search (example) and annotation
• Search by license (prototypes: journals, images)

PD Image
Search by license — not possible yet. Why?

• Semantic integration

Non-wiki example

MediaWiki as a blog, using Semantic MediaWiki

• Integration of non-text media with text (just like images; non-wiki audio example)

Also for references

• Automated pre-population from databases

Quotes

From the JoPM peer review discussion (my comments)

Peter Frishauf, founder of Medscape (3:29-3:44 in part 4):"Wikipedia is probably the most robust Petri dish we have for actually studying the process of words and contributions, because it is auditable."

Elizabeth Wager of Jefferson et al., 2002 (10:37-10:56 in part 4): "So, we had the idea that you do your systematic review before you do your research; you do your research, and then if you haven't changed much, you haven't really made a big impact, whereas if you've actually shifted things one way or the other and made it more precise then you have."

Peter Sefton (The next wave in scholarly word processors?): "what I think we need in scholarship is the web, but editable"

Chris Gutteridge (in 1st comment on Sefton's post): "Better still, if you assert something said in another paper, sod the citation, transclude the relevant text, with a full electronic citation allowing you to verify it."

From I Hate Your Paper - The Scientist "I believe strongly [that] in the end, all life is on the record," Smith says—"you should stand by what you say, and you should put your own name on it. It makes me uncomfortable that science has moved away from that."

• Speculations on the future of science By Kevin Kelly : New ways of knowing will emerge. "Wikiscience" is leading to perpetually refined papers with a thousand authors. Distributed instrumentation and experiment, thanks to miniscule transaction cost, will yield smart-mob, hive-mind science operating "fast, cheap, & out of control." Negative results will have positive value (there is already a "Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine"). Triple-blind experiments will emerge through massive non-invasive statistical data collection--- no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later. (In the Q&A, one questioner predicted the coming of the zero-author paper, generated wholly by computers.)"

"Wiki-Science – The average number of authors per paper continues to rise. With massive collaborations, the numbers will boom. Experiments involving thousands of investigators collaborating on a "paper" will commonplace. The paper is ongoing, and never finished. It becomes a trail of edits and experiments posted in real time — an ever evolving "document." Contributions are not assigned. Tools for tracking credit and contributions will be vital. Responsibilities for errors will be hard to pin down. Wiki-science will often be the first word on a new area. Some researchers will specialize in refining ideas first proposed by wiki-science. "

Automated contributions:

• Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data
• Automated hypothesis generation and testing, even high throughput and across domains
• Bot-assisted integration of knowledge manually curated in different environments (e.g. GeneWiki and WikiGenes)
• Zero-author papers

Publisher for the People (see also this FriendFeed thread) "The goal of research is to improve our knowledge. It's a cumulative process in which discovery begets discovery as scientists build on the work of their predecessors. But to unravel the mysteries of life and the cosmos, researchers need access to all available information, and that means journals, the main medium by which scientists communicate. By limiting public access now that electronic distribution is available, the journal industry is effectively working against the larger goals of science."

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“if you publish in a journal which charges for access, you are not published, you are privated. Published means to make public. If the public does not have access to it except for by a fee, it is not public, it is private.” (Dave Parry)

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User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/Integrating wikis with scientific workflows/Introduction

Notes

• use screenshots of Recent changes from mainspace around midnight from WP, EoE, SP, CZ, WE & OWW & Knol

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• Mention possibility of linking to Open Access funding, as per Microfinancing for science

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• Liquid Publications — the editable web

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On the cover image: Journals are not essential to a wiki system described here, as their function of conveying new information would go away, but they still have their role in turning edit histories into stories, and in framing debates, for which wiki talk pages are not ideal.

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Numbered referencing (as in Gyrification), or Harvard style (e.g. Brain morphometry).

Link to AcaWiki

Mention interwiki links

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• Conference on Bio wikis

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• Retractions: perspective; "retractions at Wiley-Blackwell are now running at more than one a week"; see also Comparison between paper-based and wiki-based scholarly communication systems

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• articles in Google Scholar since 2001 that use the phrase "magnetic resonance imaging is a"
• articles in Google Scholar since 2001 that use the phrase "the brain is a"

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• Referencing a DOI Within OpenWetWare

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• see also User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/Integrating wikis with scientific workflows/Publishing/Parry's recommendations

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• [Foundation-l] Call for Volunteers: Wikimedia Research Committee

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