Wikimania 2024

WikiJournal: 10th anniversary
08-07, 15:30–15:55 (Poland), Istanbul (10)
Language: English

We provide a brief overview of WikiJournal and what it achieved over the past 10 years. We also update on the latest activities from WikiJournal that took place since last Wikimania. This includes published articles, updated journal citation metrics, ongoing proposal to become a new sister project, new collaborations, latest initiatives, challenges encountered, and upcoming plans.


WikiJournal was launched in March 2014. Started off as a platinum open access journal for Medicine, it has since expanded to two additional journal to cover science and humanities. The session will talk about how our project bridged the gap between academic researchers and Wikimedia community. We showcase a small sample of published articles in WikiJournals and its impacts to both research community and Wikimedia projects. We will also answer the concerns raised by community members in our sister project proposal (e.g. publishing original research content, article quality). We also talk about some innovative initiatives that the project experimented to reach wider audiences (such as dual-publishing articles in English and non-English languages). The session also shares information on how to participate in the project as an author, editorial board member, subject matter peer reviewer and community reviewer.

Session recording: https://youtu.be/j4jFqkG8iHg?t=20560


How does your session relate to the event themes: Collaboration of the Open?*

While for-profit publishing houses have begun switching many of their journals to hybrid open access formats, cost to publish and read peer-reviewed journal articles remain a high barrier for many researchers and students in the Global South and marginalized groups in the Global North. Furthermore, the peer review process of these journals is often described as "black box" operation to those who are unfamiliar with the process. WikiJournal supports this year's theme "Collaboration of the Open" by eliminating financial cost and subscription fee from consideration. This ensures that the merits of the content alone is the only factor for publication consideration. Since all of our articles and images are published under a free and open license, the contents can be readily reused in any Wikimedia sites or other free license journals. This allowed the text of published WikiJournal articles to be re-used in Wikipedia pages and images to be uploaded into Commons. Commons enjoys higher publicity and enabled further dissemination of high quality, open license images originally published in WikiJournal into academic textbooks, reports and other peer-reviewed articles.

Our journal also practices in open peer review, that is, the reviewers' comments are published in open. This supports a collaborative nature of the wiki environment and introduces transparency in the peer review process. We further encourage peer reviewers to have their identity made open (though they continue to have the option to be anonymous). In Europe and North America, many research funders are demanding that the recipients to publish their research in an open access journal. Although WikiJournal has existed for 10 years, it remains relatively unknown in both research and Wikimedia communities. I want to take this opportunity at Wikimania to showcase how WikiJournal supported open publishing for the last decade and can further facilitate research activities that are mutually beneficial to research and Wikimedia communities.

What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?*

Everyone can participate in this session

How do you plan to deliver this session?*

Onsite in Katowice

What other themes or topics does your session fit into? Please choose from the list of tags below.

Collaboration, Affiliates, Capacity building

See also: Presentation

Andrew has been an active Wikimedian since 2005. He is an administrator on English Wikipedia and English Wikivoyage, and a bureaucrat on Wikispecies. He is interested in supporting languages and sister projects that are not as well represented as English Wikipedia, such as Chinese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikivoyage, English Wikiversity and Wikispecies. He is currently the editor-in-chief for WikiJournal of Science, which seeks to bridge the gap between the academic researcher and Wikimedia communities.