WikiJournal User Group/3-year plan (2021-2024)

The 3-year plan of WikiJournal is to focus on the following:

Building a technical infrastructure
The technical infrastructure is in need of constant improvement to make processes as easy as possible for users (including authors, reviewers, editors and readers). This takes the form of:


 * Reducing (and ideally eliminating) any requirements to understand wikimarkup for contributors
 * Consistent and robust editorial tracking and processing of articles through peer review
 * Clear formatting of articles
 * Deep metadata on all aspects of journal functions

A current key part of the technical infrastructure consists of hiring technical editors. It will allow other participants to continue their various roles in the project, without getting distracted by repetitive technical tasks. The ongoing process is hiring 6 volunteers who will do part-time work that altogether corresponds to up to 1 full-time job. This number is presumed to increase over the upcoming 3 years, as granted by Wikimedia Foundation which provides grants for the purpose.

Keeping the aims of the project
WikiJournal will strive to keep its goal of publishing scholarly works with no cost for the authors, applying quality checks on submissions by expert peer review, and making accepted works available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity. It will keep applying academic peer review to its content.

2020 had 15 new articles, and the project expects to see an increase in the annual amount of article publications.

Continued outreach
WikiJournal expects multiple presentations, and media mentions similarly to past years, such as at the Wikicite 2020 conference.

Additional journals
In addition to existing journals (medicine, science and humanities), the project aims to initiate journals in additional fields. There is an ongoing process in initiating a journal in Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences.

Volunteer expansion
2020 saw 12 new editorial board members and volunteer associate editors, up to a total of about 60 people in total. The goal over the upcoming years is to attract a continued growth of participants at all levels.

Improving and streamlining procedures
In 2020, there was a large-scale reorganisation to host article metadata in Wikidata, including: There was also a preparation for greater depth of metadata via STARDIT
 * WikiJSci, WikiJMed and WikiJHum volumes and articles
 * Template:Article info
 * WikiJournal User Group/Potential upcoming articles
 * Template:Article in processing
 * WikiJournal User Group/Editors
 * Template:editor info
 * Category:Wikipedia articles published in peer-reviewed literature
 * Template:Academic peer reviewed

It is the goal over the following 3 years to continue improving and streamlining journal procedures. A major goal for this purpose is automation of recurrent items such as indexing in external databases for published articles.