Scientific Journal to Authors: Publish in Wikipedia or Perish
Every day, hundreds of articles appear in academic journals and very little of this information is available to the public. Now, RNA Biology has decided to ask every author who submits an article to a newly created section of the journal about families of RNA molecules to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. As Nature reports, this is the first time an academic journal has forced its authors to disseminate information this way. The initiative is a collaboration between the journal and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Every new Wikipedia page will go through the same peer review process as the original article, though afterward, of course, the pages are open for editing just like every other page in the Wikipedia.
As far as we are aware, this is indeed the first time an academic journal has created this kind of explicit link between the academic peer-review process and the Wikipedia. The relationship between academia and the Wikipedia has always been an uneasy one, and it will be interesting to see how the academic community is going to react to this experiment.
Here is an excerpt from RNA Biology's new submission guidelines for its authors:
At least one stub article (essentially an extended abstract) for the paper should be added to either an author's userspace at Wikipedia (preferred route) or added directly to the main Wikipedia space (be sure to add literature references to avoid speedy deletion). This article will be reviewed alongside the manuscript and may require revision before acceptance. Upon acceptance the former articles can easily be exported to the main Wikipedia space.
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Frederic, that's a great title
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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December 18, 2008 4:22 PM
It'll be interesting to see what Wikipedians make of this. Just because something has citations doesn't mean it won't get deleted - there are many criteria to be considered for a viable Wikipedia entry. I think it'll need to be kept to the personal namespace in any case.
As a long-time contributor to Wikipedia I have very mixed feelings about this. Many academics come to Wikipedia expecting a very different system than what we have. Wikipedia is idiosyncratic and does not function very similarly to academia. I hope that that they will get some long-time users to assist in writing these articles. The advice as given in the linked guidelines looks good. Overall, I am optimistic.
As an open science/open data guy, I still have reservations, mostly cause I am not sure Wikipedia is the correct medium.
To some extent, it almost seems like the journal is trying to avoid building a quality open access system and trying to shoe horn something into Wikipedia.
Don't get me wrong, this is an intriguing idea. Just not convinced it's the right place. Will have to see. Maybe they are on to something
This is against the rules for Wikipedia -- no original research, remember? The rules should not be changed -- they should just start their own wiki. An original research wiki. It would be long overdue; they could set the rules more appropriately for the goal; and it could become a worldwide, discipline-wide phenomenon.
DBL, once the papers are accepted by a journal there's no original research problem. We've had a number of academics add details based on their research. As long as they cite them to peer reviewed journals that's fine.
This is great. Wikipedia is one of my starting points whenever I want to research on a particular subject (academic or not), besides google. It is a time saver for me.
By the way, how about scholarpedia?
This is a bizarre move and suggests that somebody in power is getting excited about the wrong thing.
The Open Access movement is well established with many academic outlets making resources freely available online from institutional archives to free digital journals. It's been particularly strong in the sciences.
Here's a dated but useful list of resources I put together on the topic a while back:
http://www.culturalresearch.org/resources/openaccess.html
Although academic materials are in general available if you look enough, for those who don't have the research skills, wikipedia is the first place to go. Great more that will possibly lead to greater information access for more.
This seems like a really stupid idea. Scientific research is not something the public should be editing. What if someone changes the data, or deletes results, and no one catches it? This is how myths and misunderstandings get created.
Wikipedia has never been a respected source of information so how this move pretend to have a good result including valuable information into this website?
Joshua, I read this the same way DBL did. The *submission* requires a Wikipedia entry, long before any review grants acceptance for publishing.
You can't link to something that is not already published, and this is the very definition of original research.
Creating a Wiki for peer review is one thing, but you can't post it or host it according to Wikipedia's TOS and/or culture.
Ike, they say explicitly that it should start in userspace. That's fine then. They put it in userspace and if the paper gets accepted we move it to mainspace. If not then it gets deleted or possibly left alone until they find another journal to accept the paper.
Why Wikipedia? I don't think it is the right medium. I would rather want to see the journal open up a wiki and publish there.