Wikiversity:Publishing original research

Where do I publish

Increasingly online preprints databases are supplementing or replacing peer reviewed journals as sources for research. The major preprints databases are:

http://www.ssrn.com - Social Science Research Network
http://econpapers.repec.org - Working papers in economics
http://www.arxiv.org - Physics and astronomy preprints archive

How do I publish

The main thing that you need to do to publish an academic paper is to collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. Find a group of people to share ideas with and to argue with.

Start by getting together a rough draft on your wiki page, and use this to get comments from people. Don't be afraid that people will trash your ideas, because the purpose of sharing rough ideas is precisely to get people to trash them. Start with a few people that you are comfortable working with, and as the article gels, you can share it with a wider and wider group of people. At this point your draft article should probably have a "DO NOT CITE" tag associated with it, signifying that it is a rough article with possible incorrect data and assertions.

Over time your article will start to reach a form in which you feel comfortable signing your name on it. At that point you will need to upload it to one of the preprints databases. You can also at that point consider submitting it to one of the paper journals.

Publishing in traditional journals

Publishing in wiki media

The original Wikiversity proposal of 2005 proposed that Wikiversity should, "test the limits of the wiki model both for developing electronic learning resources as well as for teaching and for conducting research and publishing results (within a policy framework developed by the community)".

"..... the idea here is to also host learning communities, so people who are actually trying to learn, actually have a place to come and interact and help each other figure out how to learn things. We're also going to be hosting and fostering research into how these kinds of things can be used more effectively." (source)

In order to support publishing of original research, Wikiversity can make use of systems for formal peer review.

Academic publishing on-wiki

Current wiki journals

WikiJournal user group - a set of peer-reviewed, academic journals similar to this initial concept
- WikiJournal of Medicine - The flagship publication of the WikiJournal User Group
- WikiJournal of Science
- WikiJournal of Humanities
Scholarpedia - an academic-written encyclopedia
Ancilla Iuris - a law journal

Past wiki journals

Nupedia - a 2000–2003 academic-written encyclopedia
Citizendium - a 2006–2020 academic-written encyclopedia
academia.wikia.com - a 2006–2007 academic publishing wiki

External links

Wikiversity research policy (beta wikiversity)