Talk:WikiJournal User Group/Archive 2021

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New journal proposal

Dear colleagues, here is the proposal for the new journal discussed at our last board call:

Preferred journal title: WikiJournal of Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences

Comment: We have considered a variety of options, and believe that this reflects the intended multidisciplinary nature of the proposed journal, while complementing the breadth offered by the existing portfolio.

Scope: The goal of this journal is to make the best information about applied psych science available to mental health professionals in research and practice, so that top quality research can improve lives more quickly. The scope is more narrow than the older successful WikiJournals, with the goal of attracting focal themes for special issues and projects. Emphases include dissemination and implementation, open source platforms and accessibility, and open science and reproducibility. Intended audience includes researchers and educators, with more attention to replication and application than many traditional outlets. We believe in a model that makes it possible for the world’s experts to contribute to a public commons that shares knowledge and speeds progress for all.

Names of initial interested editors: Note that this is a work in progress, but initial interest has been high.

Interested editors
Name Wiki Account Country Affiliation Wikidata Q
Eric Youngstrom, PhD Eyoungstrom USA UNC Chapel Hill/HGAPS Q27734333
Robert L. Findling, MD, MBA USA Virginia Commonwealth University/HGAPS Q90314248
Guillermo Perez Algorta, PhD Elborde07 UK/Uruguay Lancaster University/HGAPS Q42852533
Emily Becker-Haimes, PhD USA University of Pennsylvania/HGAPS Q91478910
Andrea Young, PhD USA Johns Hopkins University/HGAPS Q38547062
Kathryn Van Eck, PhD USA Johns Hopkins University Q87955302
Ekaterina Stepanova, PhD USA Johns Hopkins University Q91540088
Danella Hafeman, PhD USA University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Q104374125
Amelia Buttress, PhD USA Johns Hopkins University Q99594518
Tom Frazier, PhD USA Autism Speaks/John Carroll University Q90432014
Gin Malhi, MD Australia President, ISBD Q89872646
Anna Van Meter, PhD Arvm USA Northwell Health/HGAPS Q86153174
Mian-Li Ong, PhD Ongmianli USA/Singapore Mayo Clinic Q99986770
Ginger Nicol, MD USA Washington University, St. Louis Q64764404


1 Year Plan: The plan for the first year is to use four complementary streams to feed the journal:

  1. Co-publish a set of articles on evidence-based assessment, written by established experts. The first versions are in an edited volume published in 2020 (chapter list here). A subset will have shorter versions submitted for consideration for a special issue of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. The contributors will be invited to send a third version to the WikiJournal. We will use Creative Commons licensing to help authors share their products with minimal added effort, and differentiate the WikiJournal versions via all of the advantages of “paperless” and “Wiki-direct” publishing, including color figures, sortable tables, and embedded links to Wiki pages, PDFs, and other resources
  2. Invite commentaries and reaction papers from luminaries to extend the visibility of the journal and the diversity of submissions
  3. Continue to vet and submit a set of articles related to assessment and open science (e.g., article versions related to resource kits, infographic galleries, review of microbiome and mental health, and updated meta-analyses; ROC primer update…)
  4. Expand a masthead of rising stars and recognized leaders from multiple disciplines and geographical regions, with the goal of achieving recognition and credibility, in order to increase submission from productive research teams

We anticipate working closely with [Helping Give Away Psychological Science] and its affiliated WikiMedia User group to raise visibility, create training materials, and organize author teams with inclusion of early career and trainees who are conversant with Wiki editing.

Let us know what else would be helpful detail, and looking forward to next steps in the process!

Eyoungstrom (discuss • contribs) 16:53, 22 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If we accept the proposal (which I support) and establish the WikiJournal of Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences, it seems that the WikiJournal of Humanities would need to change its content description, which currently reads: "The WikiJournal of Humanities is a journal devoted to the humanities, arts, psychology, and social sciences in their broadest sense." What do others think?   - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) 14:49, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Great point! I wonder about leaving WikiJournal of Humanities as having the same broad scope, and clarifying/emphasizing that the new journal would be focused in a way that is more narrow and deeper on clinical science and application. There would be a lot of value in keeping a broad umbrella for submissions in general. The image in my mind's eye is of a dartboard with several smaller targets (not one bull's eye) nestled around the larger concentric circles of the bigger & broader targets. Looking forward to others' thoughts, and best wishes for the rest of the holidays to all as well! Eyoungstrom (discuss • contribs) 17:51, 29 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Agree. The focus of most submissions to WikiJHum so far have been arts and humanities, so I think the minor overlap won't be a huge issue. Obviously it's for the editors of WikiJHum to decide on though. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 07:54, 3 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Discussions are archived for review purposes. Please start a new discussion to discuss the topic further.


There seems to be broad support for this. It was also brought up at yesterday's meeting with similar agreement. I'll therefore mark this as closed and once the preferred URL is decided we can create the necessary pages. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 03:58, 30 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Application to join the administrative board

Discussions are archived for review purposes. Please start a new discussion to discuss the topic further.


Hello everyone,

My name is Sarah and I would like to join as a volunteer in the administrative board. First I want to help out as head of HR, starting with helping in the onboarding of our six new technical editors. I have a degree in English and business in the United States, so I have knowledge about requirements of insurance coverage etc. for hiring people in the US. I agree to the confidentiality policies of WikiJournal. Conflicts of interest: I am the wife of Mikael Häggström, current administrative board member and editor-in-chief of WikiJournal of Medicine. However, I will work for the best interest of WikiJournal. In my spare time, I like cooking and playing with our mischievous cat. SHaggstrom (discuss • contribs) 21:48, 27 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Support. I think it's very beneficial for the journal to let Sarah head the HR administration for the onboarding of our new technical editors. Although we are starting small (a total work time corresponding to up to one full time job), I think it is important that we establish it properly already, including necessary employer coverage. I likewise declare my conflict of interest in this support, as husband to Sarah, and I will be careful to keep acting for the best interest of WikiJournal. Mikael Häggström (discuss • contribs) 21:58, 27 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support - we can use all the help we can get! --Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 16:15, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support - I've nothing against it, and I can see how the help would be beneficial (as we increase in needed paperwork overhead as a registered nonprofit). The admin board deals with the non-publishing aspects of running the journals, so publishing or academic experience isn't as relevant. It will also be worth listing the scope of the admin board here. Indeed, I think we should also put a call out to other members of the boards (espec those with treasury or nonprofit experience to join the admin board). T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 00:41, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support. sounds good to me cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) talk 18:30, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support I think editors need continuous encouragement especially in the current situation of pandemic.--23:06, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Support --Alaa :)..! 14:05, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support Despite the natural reservations any dog person would have. -- Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 14:22, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Since it's been unanimous support after 3 weeks, I'll mark this as passed! @SHaggstrom:, I've added you to this list, to the admboard mailing list, and added an archived copy here T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 05:30, 21 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Prose quality guidelines

A suggestion has been added over at Talk:WikiJournal_of_Medicine about writing clarity guidelines and resources. It refers to WikiJMed, it might also be relevant to other journals. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 10:41, 11 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion policy

The issue has started to come up around deletion of pages in WikiJournal Preprints. Taking a look at some example policies (arXiv, OSF, Zenodo, preprints.org), I've drafted something below to eventually add to the ethics guidelines.

Preprint deletion requests (by author)

For preprints that have not yet been submitted to a journal, the submitting author(s) may request deletion of their page for any reason per wikiversity deletion policies.

For preprints that have been submitted to a journal, an author can request deletion by providing a justification (see below).

Preprint deletion requests (by editor)

For preprints (whether submitted or not), an editor can propose deletion by providing a justification (see below).

Potential deletion reasons

Removal of preprints by an editor or by an author after submission is considered an exceptional action. Below are some of the potential justifications for deletion.

  • Academic misconduct (e.g. plagiarism or copyright violation; contains fictitious or fabricated content; contains sensitive or harmful information)
  • Academic standards (e.g. does not meet threshold for potential peer review or is substantive; contains serious errors, or significantly misrepresents information)
  • Vandalism or vexation (frequent submission of content deleted for the reasons above may result in bans from uploading subsequent preprints)

For articles that have been submitted to a journal, the metadata item on wikidata will be retained, and in most cases a permanent record will remain at the previous page to summarise the reason for deletion.

What do people think? T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 03:32, 15 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Additional note: Here's a search for declined WikiJournal Preprints in wikidata. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:47, 16 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps "does not meet threshold for potential peer review or is substantive" should be "does not meet threshold for potential peer review or is not substantive"? --JayBeeEll (discuss • contribs) 21:24, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
At face value, it looks like we would not be deleting much. In particular, a preprint would not be deleted just because it has been rejected. Moreover, we would not commit to deleting it if the authors asks it. To me this sounds right, because the reviewers' and editors' work on a rejected preprint should remain available, in case the preprint ends up being submitted elsewhere. But the authors should be explicitly warned. Sylvain Ribault (discuss • contribs) 17:36, 3 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Grant application soon to be submitted

Hello all,

The grant application to sustain WikiJournal June to December is to be submitted by the end of this month, and is located here:

So this is your final chance to make comments and edits before submission.

Mikael Häggström (discuss • contribs) 00:50, 30 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Questions on competition, promotion, and scope

Hi all!

Given the general level of frustration with the oligopoly of academic publishers, it's exciting to see new infrastructure for open-access journals being built. So, I just joined the WikiJournal User Group in order to stay abreast of the latest efforts on this project. Since I'm generally curious to know where this project is headed, I thought I'd go ahead and ask the questions that have already occurred to me.

  1. Has anyone done a comparison of WikiJournal with other open-access solutions, such as Scholastica or PLOS?
  2. The proposal indicates that editing capacities would be restricted upon article acceptance. Would this be similar to the practices on Scholarpedia?
  3. Is there any documentation of efforts to promote WikiJournal to researchers who are not already a part of the Wikimedia community?
  4. According to the WikiJournal proposal, WikiJournal aims to be a solution to a problem faced by Wikipedia (lack of information, lack of contributions from academics). This was surprising to me because WikiJournal strikes me as a solution to a larger problem, as large as the one solved by Wikipedia itself. It's hard to overstate the extent of existing knowledge that's locked up in expensive research journals and therefore inaccessible to the vast majority of the world's population. If WikiJournal could do for academic research what Wikipedia has done for encyclopedic information, it would be a tremendous leap forward for knowledge equity. A lot of research is locked up for the time being, but that doesn't have to be the case for new research. Of course, changing existing practices won't be easy without serious attention and effort (and maybe software tools for automatic format conversion, e.g. for converting LaTeX documents to WikiJournal articles); however, the effort required to reach this larger goal is not obviously much greater than that required for the current goal of supporting Wikipedia. (Actually, maybe the pushback over fears of circularity with Wikipedia might be lessened.) So, my question is this: Is there a reason why WikiJournal is not framed as a solution to a larger problem of knowledge equity?

Thank you so much!

Greg at Higher Math Help (discuss • contribs) 13:28, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Greg at Higher Math Help: Totally agree with the problems of increasing consolidation by the for-profit megapublishers. Below are my thoughts on your questions:
  1. There's a few aspects to this. One is the platform the other is the publisher.
    • Platform: Using Mediawiki (hopefully with integrated open journal systems back end in the future) has some benefits for process transparency, microversioning, and compatibility with other wikimedia foundation projects (expec. wikipedia, wikidata, wikicommons) compared to other available platforms (open source e.g OJS, Redalyc or commercial e.g. Scholastica, EditorialManager). There's a page of relevant info here by @Mietchen.
    • Publisher: There is a comparison page for this aspect that @George Ho compiled. The main comparison to the big OA publishers (PLOS, BMC, etc) is that most have to charge APCs, whereas we';re aming to go the 'diamond Open access' route as well as prioritising transferability of material to other sites and platforms.
  2. I'd expect it to be somewhat similar except with versioning. Something I'm rather keen on is versioned publishing similar to textbooks, or indicators around specific sections to indicate that data is being live updated.
  3. There's a summary of possible promotional materials here. The best current materials geared towards academics are probably:
  4. I guess the short answer is that framing WikiJournals as a solution to a larger problem of knowledge equity has previously felt intimidatingly large. However there are a number of members who are focused on exactly that and we're moving towards it as the systems have been built and scaled up (e.g. processes, wikidata integration, community control of the project etc). I agree that the 'value proposition' is different to wikimedians versus academics. For wikimedians, the pitch is attracting expert input to wikimedia ecosystem content as writers and reviewers. The pitch for the academic community is the broader aspect you're talking about (as well as the increase reach and public understanding aspect).
    • The place where we should start formulating and laying this out more clearly will be the 1-year plan and 3-year plan.
Great questions! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 07:13, 19 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@T.Shafee: Wow, thank you so much for the thorough response! I just read through it (I read through most of the linked pages, but it will take some time to read through all of them). This is great stuff. The advantages over other open-access solutions that immediately stand out to me are these:
  1. a single place for searching and browsing articles instead of a zillion journals hosted in different places (and a common platform for contributing),
  2. no setup fees or other costs for developing a website and no fees for the authors,
  3. built-in versioning that makes it easy to incorporate corrections,
  4. a greater potential for transparency (e.g. peer-review transparency),
  5. a single platform for collaborative research (e.g. the Polymath Wiki) and the finished product of that research, and
  6. backing from the Wikimedia Foundation.
The first point above also means that authors would likely get increased exposure, since a large website with lots of inbound links is likely to fare better in search rankings than a small site for a niche journal, and since browsing will be much easier (either through directory pages or in some cases, by link surfing). Exposure would also be increased by the compatibility with Wikimedia projects, and by the added emphasis on transferability.
Question A: Does any other platform have all these features, that you know of?
My thinking is that if a broader pitch to the academic community were made, perhaps based on these advantages, then that would potentially have a greater impact on Wikimedia as well. After all, when more academics publish with WikiJournal, there will be more expert input to the Wikimedia ecosystem. I would guess that this value proposition would appeal to Wikimedians as much as it would to academics.
Also, many of the criticisms of the proposal to make WikiJournal a sister project revolve around Wikipedians writing their own research in order to be able to say whatever they want on Wikipedia (under the assumption that they would get their friends to do peer review, although you may have mechanisms to prevent that). If the project had a larger contributor base outside of Wikimedia, maybe those concerns would be mitigated.
It would be an ambitious vision, but to me, that's what makes it exciting (provided a decent case can be made that the probability of success is nonzero). Excitement can be an extra bump that may be needed to encourage researchers to try it out. To make the case, it may help that there is already sort of a precedent in Wikipedia. When Wikipedia first came into existence, it was not at all obvious that a volunteer community on an open wiki would be able to produce quality encyclopedic content, and Scholarpedia has shown that peer review on a MediaWiki platform can work.
Question B: If the framing in the 1-year plan or 3-year plan shifts from a Wikimedia focused project to a broader vision, do you think this will be summarized or mentioned in the mailing list? I'd like to stay up-to-date.
If that does happen, then it'd be nice to have a couple blurbs on the main page describing the vision, outlining key advantages, and linking to the more detailed pages you provided. At that point, it'd be easier to promote the project because there'd be a single page to point people to, and I'd be happy to contribute some ideas about how the project might be promoted to a wider audience. I have a number of ideas regarding promotional activities generally, including ones not already listed in the pages you referenced. For now, if you're interested, you might find some inspiration from the activities in the Eventmath proposal (this is a current grant proposal for Wikiversity that I submitted along with bwsulliv). The Eventmath proposal is geared toward organizing a community of math educators, many of whom are academics who will likely be new to Wikimedia projects, so there is some overlap.
Thanks again for your detailed reply!
Greg at Higher Math Help (discuss • contribs) 14:19, 19 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Article title format - Why no consistency?

WikiJournals do not have consistency in title format, both sentence and title cases are used in different articles. Should't the journals follow Wikipedia's policy? Chhandama (discuss • contribs) 09:14, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Chhandama: See Wikiversity:Naming conventions#Casing. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 02:08, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That shows my point only. If we consider one journal as "the same course or curriculum" by definition, it is better to use a particular case format consistently for all articles in that journal. Note that my point is, all Wikijournals use a mixed-up style. Chhandama (discuss • contribs) 03:14, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That's a reasonable point (especially since some articles currently have a mix within the same title!). I think it's reasonable to move all the articles to being sentence case, since it's clearer when capitalised words are actually meaningful. For new articles, it's a simple case of deciding to be consistent.
For previous affected articles, we should probably run it past the editorial boards top make sure there are no objections to editing published works (though it's formatting/copyediting rather than meaning-changing, so unlikely to be a problem). The practical steps would then be 1) Pagemove the articles, 2) update wikidata 3) update crossref 4) update the PDFs. The first two are simple and can be done by anyone. The third and fourth will need to be done editorial board memebers - who have access to the crossref password and the folder of docx articles that the editors keep. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 03:54, 24 October 2021 (UTC) - updated 11:22, 29 October 2021 (UTC) [reply]
I agree @Evolution and evolvability and @Chhandama. Sentence case, following Wikipedia's convention. Fransplace (discuss • contribs) 05:02, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Agree; doing the same as Wikipedia is sensible. 08:43, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I agree, that we should follow the Wikipedia convention. Style consistency helps readability and is a strength of Wikipedia. J S Lundeen (discuss • contribs) 15:14, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It may also be useful to follow Wikipedia conventions on straightquotes (so changing WikiJournal of Science/“Collect, acquire, analyze, report, and disseminate statistical data related to the science and engineering enterprise…”: The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics to WikiJournal of Science/"Collect, acquire, analyze, report, and disseminate statistical data related to the science and engineering enterprise…": The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics). I don't think this would affect too many pages. Would there need to be any updates to Crossref metadata if the article names (and therefore URLs) change? Thanks! —Collin (Bobamnertiopsis)t c 22:52, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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