User:OpenScientist/Open grant writing/Community-Projektbudget 2011

This project is one of six that have been chosen for funding.

About
This page and its subpages host an English summary of a grant application for the "Community-Projektbudget" funding scheme run by Wikimedia Germany. The proposal has been submitted in time for the deadline of Oct 28, 2011 (German time) and was announced as approved on February 13, 2012.

Project title
WikiJournal

Target
The main purpose of this project is to support initiatives aimed at designing formal scholarly publication workflows such that the publications produced this way (or significant elements thereof) are optimized for reuse on Wikimedia projects. Some examples of such initiatives are given in this Signpost entry. All of them are the initiative of a few individuals and lack in at least one of the following dimensions: technical implementation, community involvement, licensing, finances, outreach, metrics and citation of the wiki versions after incorporation of the OA materials. The WikiJournal project is meant to significantly improve the potential of such initiatives to serve as role models for reusable scientific publishing.

Possible avenues of support
''In order to exhibit potential avenues by which such initiatives could be supported, a number of existing initiatives will briefly be reviewed, and room for improvements highlighted. It is improvements of this kind that the proposal is meant to provide.''

The policy at the journal RNA Biology to require the draft for a Wikipedia entry to be submitted along with manuscripts on new RNA families is already quite optimized in terms of the publishing workflow, there are no licensing problems, no money is involved, and there are few technical issues (mainly automation). So here, the main target for improvement would be in terms of metrics (especially traffic flows between the journal and Wikipedia) and outreach to researchers concerned (a) with RNA families and closely related systems and (b) other research objects that are typically being named in publications (e.g. biological species, or chemical compounds), with the aim of getting some of them to try a similar approach in their next paper, i.e. submit a draft for a Wikipedia article along with their manuscript, irrespective of the journal.

The collaboration between ZooKeys and Wikispecies requires automation to scale, and once this works, the approach could in principle be extended to any open-access journal published under a Wikimedia-compatible (i.e. open) license.

The nascent initiatives at PLoS Computational Biology and Gene, naturally, have issues all across the board and could probably benefit from addressing them together or as case studies for open-access and subscription journals. For instance, PLoS Computational Biology normally charges authors a fee that covers the publication costs of an article that is then freely and openly available to the readers, whereas Gene normally charges readers, not authors, and prevents reuse by not using Creative Commons licensing. Both initiatives would benefit from automation, outreach and metrics, and the availability of some stimulus funds could facilitate their start.

Once some outreach materials exist, one could also imagine support for the conversion of sets of Scholarpedia articles to openly licensed content, or for the translation of openly licensed scholarly publications of the kind produced by the above approaches.