Sarah Bridle wrote:Blimey! I agree, v radical re writing a paper using a publically accessible wiki!
I would absolutely love it if research were done like this.
:))))
But I don't see how it can work within the current funding system.
We all need to get funding and the amount of funding we get is based on our output of refereed papers.
How would funding bodies ever rate our output in the wiki system?
Don't get me wrong, I would love it to be as you suggest but we have to win over the funding bodies at the same time, as otherwise how can people afford to spend their time on this?
In most countries, once people have tenured faculty positions, there is no direct link between number of refereed papers and salary, there's only peer pressure, and (at least in France) there is probably a big majority opinion that publishing 5 papers per year is not necessarily that much more useful for good research than publishing one paper per year. The USA, UK, Canada and Australia - the countries where people take the longest to get tenured positions - are not the only countries where cosmology is done. In France, Spain, India, Japan, ... people still get tenured positions relatively young, around 30-35ish, though the pressure is pushing this to older ages.
In any case, if cosmologists (and other astronomers) organise, we don't have to accept the failed-economic-ideology model which is being pushed on universities and research institutes. Exactly
how we should do this, or whether or not it is a priority, and whether or not we as a community are ready to do this, is another question. However, IMHO it is definitely something that
can be done.
The French research community - going across the whole spectrum from sociology and philosophy to cosmology and particle physics - has been organising for the past year and a half to tell the government that decisions on research spending, including reverting the destruction of faculty positions, but also the creation of new faculty positions, should be made rationally and reasonably and based on the decisions of researchers together with participation from the general public. Concrete demands have been made, all sorts of different campaigning techniques have been used, and the government has been forced to give back a few billion euros (AFAIK). Since i'm not in France at the moment, i haven't followed this in detail, so don't quote me ;) on the specific details above. The main web site is:
http://recherche-en-danger.apinc.org/
All sorts of communities around the world are starting to better self-organise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organisation and force pseudo-democratic governments (USA, UK, Australia, ...) to act more like representatives and less like authoritarians, in part thanks to the internet, though also IMHO due to the inherent inconsistencies of the communist and capitalist economic systems with human rights.
Anyway, independently of my generalisations, the fact is that the French research community is acting very effectively to self-manage and impose this on our pseudo-democratic government.
But getting back to the idea of a partly-wiki journal, the practical question is how many cosmologists would be willing to try this to start off. More or less by definition, it's only going to be people with tenured positions, who tend to be older. And older people tend to be less confident in new things like wikis... Hmmm.
BTW, so far i'm only throwing-ideas-around(TM), (no, it's not really a TM AFAIK ;), but there's no harm chatting about this to see where it goes...
An argument in
favour of the wiki journal - over a few-year time scale, is that just as astro-ph articles get cited twice as often as non-astro-ph articles
astro-ph/0503519, we could expect that wiki papers will get an extra boost in citation rates, especially as wikis generally get very highly rated by google, because of their innate nature of extensive cross-referencing. So the committees that judge the
impact factors of journals would sooner or later have to accept that articles in the journal have a high impact in citation rates. The wikipedia is now taken very seriously by many people, but it didn't exist 5 years ago.
And there's no need for anyone to commit to
only publishing on our new journal. It would be enough to get a few articles there and as their high quality becomes obvious (due to the continuous correcting by people annoyed at seeing errors and imprecise statements), people would start to cite them and there would be a postiive feedback process.
If there are more people who think that in principle this is a good idea and are willing to think through or invite discussion on the design questions (e.g. what level of wikification for different sections, peer-reviewing algorithm), and if we have enough people willing to cooperate on this and each willing to, e.g, commit to publish a few of their own articles on it, but we also need a few people to maintain/develop the software, maintain the server(s), etc., then IMHO it's feasible. Techies from the mediawiki and general wiki community would probably be willing to help, but we would need a few cosmologist-techies (e.g. you and i?) willing to commit the time as well.
For the moment, i have plenty of other interesting things to do, so i wouldn't put this at a high priority right now. But if there's a big interest and willingness to try, i'd be interested in supporting it. :)
On the other hand, wikipedia and wikibooks are tending towards the directions of review articles, hmmm.... maybe we could start with just a
review journal?
There's already
http://relativity.livingreviews.org/ but this is an original-author only wiki, and the same web site hosts
http://europeangovernance.livingreviews.org/ which is funded by Connex which is part of Veolia Environnement which is the new name of Vivendi Universal, which had a reputation of allegedly being one of the most corrupt French water companies and also including Universal Studios (yes, the film group in the USA). And last time i looked, Connex/Veolia Environnement had 13 billion euros debt... While in cosmology we have to make lots of compromises to get funding, livingreviews.org seems to have made more compromises with authoritarian organisations than are really necessary...
Anyway, IMHO there would be no serious competition with livingreviews.org - a wiki review journal would quickly attain much higher quality than a journal limited to a small select group of authors.