Talk:Wikis in scholarly communication

Consider beginning the project with non-original research manuscripts

(This contribution was originally made to the resource page and only later transfered here.)

Scholarly communication can take many forms. The Annual Reviews series does an excellent and extensive job with review articles. See the Annual Review of Biophysics for example. The page also lists the titles of the other review topics in the series.

Editorial reviews, such as those published in most scholarly journals -- another mode of scholarly communication.

One could also mention 'hypotheses'-type articles, opinion articles, critiques of scholarly articles, and many others that serve the purpose of scholarly communication, and could emerge as wiki-based collaborations.

One could also take an open-access article, as in PLoS, and get a collaborative group to rework it: elaborate, critique, move in new direction, etc.

One way to get started.

Making wikis more compatible with traditional peer review

Here is a brief sketch of such a wiki system (supposed to be technically feasible), with the following hierarchical access levels:

1. only peer-reviewed content visible for everybody not logged in (suppose further that some system is in place to provide log ins chiefly for scientists)
2. drafts by anyone logged in are visible only to themselves (and system admins, of course) if they do not label it as "open for collaborative editing" or "open for peer review"
3. any other content (i.e. mostly what would be considered preprints in PBE) visible to everybody logged in, possibly with some exceptions for sensitive information like patient data.

Daniel Mietchen (talk) 16:28, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

For clarification: Option 1 simply represents a wiki version of Open Access to the peer-reviewed (wiki) literature once wiki-based publishing gets more widely adopted. Daniel Mietchen (talk) 11:33, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Further point: reviews by anyone logged in are visible only to themselves (and system admins and the relevant editors, of course), unless they or the editors label them as "open to the other reviewers", "open to logged-in users" or "open to the public". Daniel Mietchen (talk) 11:46, 25 March 2009 (UTC)