WikiJournal of Humanities/Editorial board

WikiJournal of Humanities
Open access • Publication charge free • Public peer review • Wikipedia-integrated

The editorial board handles any confidential article submissions, and has final responsibility for ensuring that robust academic peer review is performed in a timely manner. Information about editorial board responsibilities, and how to apply to join the editorial board, are found below.

WikiJournal of Humanities

An open access journal with
no publication costs – About

www.WikiJHum.org
ISSN: 2639-5347
Frequency: Continuous
Since: December 2017
Funding: Wikimedia Foundation
Publisher: WikiJournal User Group

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Editorial board members

Frances Di Lauro
From: 26 November 2017
Fields: arts, humanities, social science, archaeology, religion, rhetoric

Dr Frances Di Lauro teaches writing and rhetoric. She teaches a for-credit unit about Wikipedia, and is currently Chair of the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Sydney.

Penny Richards
From: 26 November 2017
Fields: disability studies, women's history, historical geography, education

Susan Barnum
From: 26 November 2017
Fields: library science, women's history

Gilles Sahut
From: 26 November 2017
Fields: information literacy, library and information science, media studies, education

Dennis Abrams
From: 26 November 2017
Fields: law, linguistics

Anne McClanan
From: 23 December 2017
Fields: art history, medieval studies, Byzantine studies

Anne McClanan is a Professor of Art History at Portland State University, and in addition to her research in medieval art also works in the development of OERs and other areas of the Digital Humanities.

Alice White
From: 29 January 2018
Fields: history of science, history of technology, history of engineering, history of medicine, labor history, modern period

Dr Alice White is a historian, Wikimedian and digital editor working at Wellcome Collection.

João Peschanski
From: 9 April 2018
Fields: political sociology, media studies, popular science

Sarah Vital
From: 10 June 2018
Fields: information literacy, scholarly communication, telecommunication, social network, social media

Sarah Vital is an academic librarian and lecturer in Business Communication at Saint Mary's College of California. Her work with students and faculty focuses on the social nature of information and questioning trustworthiness, authority, and what voices and experiences are included and excluded in the traditional and new publishing media.

Amy Fountain
From: 10 June 2018
Fields: linguistics, anthropology, endangered language, language documentation, language revitalization, participatory research

Amy Fountain is a faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Her training is in Anthropology and Linguistics, and her research focuses on under-resourced language communities in North America, and on the development of digital resources in the context of language repatriation and community-based work.

Vineeta Singh
From: 13 October 2018
Fields: ethnic studies, African American studies, critical university studies, social movement, Black feminism, historiography

Jack Nunn
From: 13 October 2018
Fields: participatory research, public health genomics

Jack Nunn the founder and Director of education organisation 'Science for All', working to involve people in sharing and creating in both the arts and sciences. Jack Nunn is a musician, composer and a poet. Jack is a PhD candidate in the Department of Public Health at La Trobe University

Cecelia Musselman
From: 13 October 2018
Fields: writing, science communication, scientific method, pedagogy

Arius Raposas
From: 1 May 2019
Fields: history, political science, public administration

Spyros Koulouris
From: 3 February 2019
Fields: library science, archive, art history, archaeology, history of photography, digital humanities

Teemu Leinonen
From: 1 May 2019
Fields: education, new media, design, media studies, learning environment

Teemu is an Associate Professor of New Media Design and Learning at the Media Lab of Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, Finland. Teemu's research interest is New Media, especially related to applications, solutions and services of e-learning, collaborative learning, collaborative group work and creative work.

Brian McKenzie
From: 1 May 2019
Fields: active learning, pedagogy, experience, history

Brian is a lecturer in Critical Skills at Maynooth University. His background is in European history but he is also interested in pedagogical research. He uses Wikipedia in the classroom to develop disciplinary skills and information literacy.

Lionel Scheepmans
From: 9 June 2019
Fields: digital anthropology

Lionel holds a doctorate in social and political sciences. He made his thesis about Wikimedia movement within the laboratory of prospective anthropology at Uclouvain University. He is also one of the administrators on French Wikiversity. More information at this online CV.

Shani Evenstein Sigalov
From: 19 August 2019
Fields: educational technology, medical education, education, curriculum development, Wikipedia, Wikidata, digital humanities, self-regulated learning, generative artificial intelligence, lifelong learning, collaborative learning, flip teaching

Shani is an EdTech Innovation Strategist at the American Medical Program at Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University and a PhD candidate at the School of Education at TAU, focusing on Technology and Education (specifically researching Wikidata as a learning platform). Since the early 2000s, she is involved with Project Ben-Yehuda, which is the Hebrew equivalent of Project Gutenberg, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the project, as well as Chair the charity that supports the project. More details about Shani's experience can be found here.

Thomas Shafee
From: 26 November 2017
Fields: biochemistry, protein evolution, bioinformatics, convergent evolution, protein engineering, experimental evolution, data science, data visualization, science communication

Dr Thomas Shafee is an evolutionary biochemist at the La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is involved bridging the Wikipedia-academia gap via dual-publishing projects with WikiJournals and PLOS.

Daniel Schneider
From: 1 November 2019
Fields: educational technology, information and communications technology, political science

Founder and main contributor of EduTechWiki

Piotr Konieczny
From: 26 March 2023
Fields: sociologist, Wikimedian, professor

Previous board members

Mikael Häggström
From: 26 November 2017 to 15 March 2019
Fields: medicine, radiology, pathology, informatics

Häggström created WikiJournal of Medicine, the first WikiJournal, and voluntarily resigned from this editorial board in March 2019 in order to focus on his duties there.

Rachel Helps
From: 28 December 2017 to 17 December 2020
Fields: American literature, Mormon art, history of the Latter Day Saint movement, editing

Rachel Helps is the coordinator of Wikipedia initiatives at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.

Kai Alexis Smith
From: 28 April 2018
Fields: African American studies, Caribbean studies, visual communication, art, art history, architecture, cultural studies

Jeffrey Keefer
From: 10 June 2018
Fields: social learning, networked learning, doctoral education, researcher development, liminality, educational research, actor–network theory

Rachel Wexelbaum
From: 28 April 2018
Fields: queer studies, social media, information seeking behavior, development, identity

Eystein Thanisch
From: 28 December 2017 to 20 July 2022
Fields: Celtic studies, medieval history, medieval literature, textual criticism, corpus linguistics

Activity

Coordinating peer reviews

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Editorial board members are expected to participate in the coordination of the peer review process of submitted articles to the board. This includes corresponding with the author, identifying potential peer reviewers, corresponding with peer reviewers and reminding peer reviewers of the review due dates. An editorial board member does not need to participate in the peer review coordination of every submitted article.

Article decisions

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The purpose of the editorial board is to form consensus about whether to include upcoming articles in the journal, based on multiple factors such as scope, peer reviewer recommendations and utility for Wikipedia. In the same manner as Wikipedia is not a democracy, the means of decision making is discussion leading to consensus; Straw polls can be used to test for consensus, but polls or surveys can impede, rather than foster, discussion.

Editorial board members will be notified by email to wjhboard googlegroups.com (only accepting emails from board members) when an article submission is up for decision, together with whether it needs to be held strictly confidential or not. An editorial board member does not need to comment on every article submission. In addition, editorial board members should join the public group of WikiJHum to stay updated about what's going on in the project. In practice, members of the editorial board have substantial communication by email, especially for confidential submissions. Public submissions can be discussed at their pages. Anyone may add their opinions and comments for such online discussions.

The main outcomes from inclusion discussions are:

Acceptance of the article
Rejection until there is an acceptable peer review of the article
Rejection until article is modified
Rejection outright

Other activities

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The editorial board also discusses and makes decisions regarding the overall operation of the journal. However, major issues that do not involve confidential matters should be discussed at the journal's public forums, at Talk:WikiJournal of Humanities, and/or the public Google Group of the journal through wikijhum googlegroups.com. Editorial board members are encouraged to invite potential additional participants to the journal.

Editorial board members may also opt to include themselves in the mailing list about matters related to the overall WikiJournal organization at the general WikiJournal mailing list. Matters that are important to the WikiJournal of Humanities should be emailed to its own mailing list as well. Editorial board members may also participate in online meetings, whose dates are usually announced by the board email list.

All positions in the journal are voluntary, that is, for no financial gain.

Editor-in-chief and assistant

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The editor-in-chief has final responsibility for all operations and policies.

The assistant to the editor-in-chief will act in place of the editor-in-chief on the event of his resignation or incapacity.

Both the editor-in-chief and the assistant to the editor-in-chief are expected to participate in public relations of the journal, including interviews and articles when opportunities arise. They are expected to add newly elected board members to the wjhboard googlegroups.com, whose presentation page (visible to members only) contains additional information for board members.

At least the editor-in-chief and the assistant to the editor-in-chief are entrusted with the journal's password to administer the journal's WikiJHum.org domain at GoDaddy. This domain needs to be renewed every other year, at a cost of approximately $30 each time. Logging into the domain's account at GoDaddy also avails for changing the email addresses included in the common email address (known by the editorial board) for updates about the journal. This site is also where redirection to another target than the current one may be done in the future.

Duties of the editor-in-chief

The editor-in-chief has final responsibilities for the operations and policies of the journal. Contact details of the editor-in-chief should be stated online. The editor-in-chief should act as the point of contact for questions relating to research and publication ethics. The editor-in-chief should acknowledge receipt of communications from institutions and should promptly bring the matter to the editorial board for action. The editor-in-chief should keep the public informed about any changes in the aims and scope of the journal.

The editor-in-chief should not disclose confidential details about work submissions with editor-in-chiefs of other journals, unless the following requirements are fulfilled:

Such sharing is a necessary part of fulfilling the obligation to prevent and respond to suspected research misconduct
The authors of the work have been informed about the issue at hand, and have not given a response, or the response was not satisfactory
The disclosure is limited to journals which are suspected of having been targeted by the research misconduct at hand, or are believed to have pertinent information of the case at hand.
The recipient editor-in-chief is notified about the sensitive nature of the information.

The amount of disclosed information should be limited to the minimum required. The shared information should be factual, while avoiding conjecture and speculation.

Further reading

Sharing of Information Among Editors-in-Chief Regarding Possible Misconduct, by COPE

Join

If you are interested in becoming an editorial board member, you need to abide by the following:

You should be willing to have your full name displayed online as seen in the list of editorial board members. Affiliations should be stated as well.
You should be familiar with the purpose and structure of the journal, as well as its Bylaws. It is also recommended to be familiar with external guidelines by which the journal abides:

ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication: [1]
COPE code of conduct for journal editors: [2]

You should abide by the confidentiality policies of the journal:

Confidentiality policies

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Most authors have allowed their article submissions to WikiJournal to be open-access in the wiki from the very beginning. Still, the main requirement as a member of the editorial board is to not leak those works that authors wish to be confidential up until publication. Many journals do not accept submissions that have been in the open at any time, and thereby authors may be harmed by premature disclosure of any or all of an article submission's details. Editorial board members therefore keep such works confidential by restricting discussions about such articles in email communications or at a closed group at Google Sites, rather than talk page entries in Wikipedia or Wikiversity. Members of the editorial board must not retain such works for their personal use.

You should generally ask for permission from the sender before posting non-public board emails to a public location such as in this wiki or forwarding to the journal's public email lists (wikijhum googlegroups.com and wikijournal-en lists.wikimedia.org).

Applying

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If you agree with the policies, please apply here. This should include a short summary of:

Humanities, arts or social sciences education and experience
Wikipedia or related project experience
Publishing or editorial experience
A statement of acceptance of the policies

All fields are optional, and you do not need to have experience in every area, however some relevant experience is very useful.

Apply to the Editorial Board

The editor-in-chief, or someone appointed by the editor-in-chief, should perform the following tasks:

Monitor the applications page, and let the editorial board know about knew applications.
The identity of the applicant should be confirmed, if not already properly evidenced. It may be done by contacting the person through an email or number from a public website (suggested email template).
Journal members may ask for clarifications or complementary information.
The editorial board will form a consensus of whether to let the applicant join the board.

Onboarding process

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For applicants accepted to the board, the following tasks should be performed:

Mark their application as accepted, by copy-pasting {{subst:WikiJournal accepted board member}} at the bottom of the section.
Contact the new editorial board member via email to inform them (Suggested email template)
Direct-add the new editorial board member to the board's private email group, which will grant them access to the private page only visible to board members
Add them to the Editorial board page using the WikiJournal editor summary template

These tasks can be distributed to any editorial board members of the journal.

Duties of editorial board members

Editorial board members should have a set of talents, experience, and competencies that will best fulfill the needs of the WikiJournal of Humanities. The full names and affiliations of the editorial board members should be displayed online.

Confidentiality

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Editorial board members must keep the confidentiality of works, author or peer reviewer identities, or other privileged information unless permission has been granted to disclose such material or information. Editorial board members must not retain confidential works or information for their personal use.

Scientific misconduct

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Scientific misconduct is defined as intention or gross negligence leading to fabrication of the scientific message or a false credit or emphasis given to a scientist. The editorial board members should inform institutions if they suspect misconduct by their researchers, and provide evidence to support these concerns, such as analysis of text similarity in cases of suspected plagiarism, or evidence of inappropriate image manipulation. They should cooperate with investigations and respond to institutions’ questions about misconduct allegations. They should be prepared to issue retractions or corrections when provided with findings of misconduct arising from investigations. They should correct or retract findings that are invalid or unreliable, both when caused by misconduct and by honest errors. Publications should be retracted if they are evidenced to be generally unreliable, while on the other hand a correction should be made in cases where only a small part of the publication is affected while the majority of findings and conclusions are valid.

Editorial board members should investigate allegations of misconduct targeted at peer reviewers of the journal. However, editorial board members may be obliged to protect the identity of whistleblowers.

In cases of scientific misconduct involving several journals, these journals should cooperate and share information as required to resolve the issues.

Editorial board members should keep communications relating to ongoing misconduct investigations confidential between parties.

Expression of concern

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An Expression of Concern may be used to inform readers about serious allegations likely to affect the reliability or integrity of a work. Expressions of Concern should not be viewed as ‘milder’ versions of retractions. The editorial board should consider issuing an Expression of Concern if:

There is inconclusive evidence scientific misconduct by the authors
There is evidence that the findings are unreliable, but there is no institution or entity available to properly investigate the case
There is reason to believe that an investigation into alleged misconduct either has not been, or would not be, fair and impartial or conclusive
An investigation is underway but a decision thereof will not be available for a considerable time

Correction

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The editorial board should consider issuing a correction if:

A small portion of an otherwise reliable publication is evidenced to be misleading, particularly if it appears to be an honest error such as a methodological error or a miscalculation
The author list is incorrect. For example, a deserving author may have been omitted or somebody who does not meet authorship criteria may have been included

Retraction

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The editorial board should consider retracting a publication if:

There is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of honest error or scientific misconduct such as data fabrication
The findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper permission or justification for publication in WikiJournal of Humanities as well
It contains plagiarism
It reports unethical research

Retractions are not usually appropriate in cases where the authorship needs to be changed but there is no reason to doubt the validity of the findings.

A retraction statement must be added in each retraced work. A retraction statements should:

Be clearly identifiable as a retraction statement, including having a title starting "Retraction statement"
Include the reasons for the retraction
Distinguish between cases of misconduct and honest error to encourage researchers to report errors when they occur and ensure no stigma is attached to this.
Be linked to the retracted work and be open access
Clearly identify which work it refers to, by at least title and authors
Be published promptly after the retraction decision
State that the editorial board has made the retraction decision

If a retraction is due to the actions of only some of the authors, the statement should mention this. However, authorship entails some degree of joint responsibility for the entire work, so the author list of a work should not change after retraction.

A retraction statement may undergo amendments by consensus of the editorial board.

Further reading

Duties of the editor-in-chief

WikiJournal User Group/Ethics statement

Full ethics statement, by the WikiJournal User Group