Green Open Access/Who did when what why

When you want to publish an open access paper the development process itself is a relevant learning resource for other authors. The key question is

Who did when, what, why?

Does answers to that questions can be provided by the Wikiversity infrastructure:

• WHO: the "who" will be answered by the login in Wikiversity and the internal version control system for any activities in the Wiki. In addition to that comment are signed in discuss and talk pages. This allows other authors to follow discussions and identify the background and skills of the participants in the discussion.
• WHEN: the "when" will be answered by the timestamp of any version in the version control system and by the timestamp of any signature in the discuss pages.
• WHAT: the "what" will be answered as well by version control system, because the differences between the versions of an article can be displayed in the history of any document in the MediaWiki.
• WHY: the "why" will be answered in general by the paper itself (e.g. in the abstract or introduction of the article), to explain to the reader what new knowledge is gained by the publication. This is available for classical articles as well. If we reguard the development process of an scientific paper as a learning resource (for which Wikiersity is designed for), the "why" explains why an experimental design is improved and another previously used method failed during the performance of an experiment. In general transparent documentation of the evolution reprocess after the scientific paper provides insights in the decision-making process of the paper development answers the question: "why is the final product of the paper like it is?"

Development Levels

If we apply the key question mentioned above to the development process, we can identify the following levels. These levels are you noted in the analogy to software development process, which just how the Alpha and Beta version off a software release management procedure. Alpha and Beta versions our preliminary leases dad have some missing features or house someplace in the version itself (see Agile Software Developement). Alpha and Beta versions are used to expose the community to the new software development and get feedback for the development. WikiJournal in comparison to that concept can used for Agile Scientific Paper Development. For the paper development we identify between 4 major steps of the evolution of papers:

• alpha-Version: Present the basic idea of the paper
• beta-Version: Add the state of art to that paper
• gamma-Version: Perform the analysis,
  • define the experimental design and perform the experiments,
  • find the proof (in mathematics),
  • doing the statistics for the collected data,
  • test the proposed new technical development according to key performance indicators
  • ...
• delta-Version: aggregate the results of different contributing results (e.g. in "Discuss" page in WikiJournals.
• 1st Release of Paper: The first release of the paper contains the paper that is submitted to peer reviewers for feedback. Peer-reviewed releases of the paper published on a protected page in the WikiJournal. The papers cited by permanent links ("Cite this page") on a protected page within Wikiversity or outside of the Wiki infrastructure (e.g. by an Organisation that makes reference to a quality assured version of the paper). The quality assurance may be performed by the organisation itself (University, Governmental Non-Governmetal Organisatlion, ...), by checking the scientific results in the context of the other scientific studies projects with monitoring in the specific organisation.

Learning Tasks

• Explore the option of WikiJournal of Medicine and WikiJournal of Science explain why using a Wiki during the development phase allows to be transparent for "Who did when what"!
• Explain the importance of permanent links (see menu item "Cite this page ..." for publications that are developed in a collaborative way and to which other authors want to contribute due to the fact, that new additional evidence is available for the topic?
• (Version Control) The management of different versions is used in collaborative software development and also e.g. in MediaWiki software for versioning of modifications of learning resources in Wikiversity or for articles in Wikipedia. Identify the similarities and differences of
  • version control in software development,
  • version management of articles in MediaWiki and
  • transparent evolution or genesis of scientific articles with visibility for "who did when what?"

What are the benefits and drawbacks of such an approach and how does Public-Private-Versioning be implemented for quality assurance of releases of articles. Keep in mind that versionsare generated for all modifications of articles and releases are quality assured versions of the paper.

See also

• Agile Software Developement
• WikiJournal of Medicine
• WikiJournal of Science
• Version Control
• Public-Private-Versioning