While Wikipedia is intended to be a general knowledge encyclopedia created by volunteers and reviewed by the general community of users, there are efforts to more closely integrate the contents with academic journal articles. This effort is being spearheaded by the WikiJournal User Group which seeks to “provide free, quality-assured knowledge” and enable “expert contributions in the traditional academic publishing format to improve Wikipedia content” through the Wiki Journal Project.
Through the project, three journals were created: WikiJournal of Medicine, WikiJournal of Humanities, and WikiJournal of Science. A fourth site, WikiJournal Preprints, houses articles still being written or undergoing peer review. At least two reviewers provide peer-review for each article, which is published and accessible to the public. There are no publishing or other fees, and when an article is finished it may become the Wikipedia article for that topic (with some limitations to conform to Wikipedia style guidelines), or used as a citation for information in an article.
All articles are published under a Creative Commons license and publicly accessible, and each journal provides its own more specific publication guidelines. There are also service opportunities to provide peer review, outreach, add post-publication reviews, and join the editorial board of each journal. Interested parties can also track the project on the talk page or join a general public email list. Each journal also has its own mailing list, Twitter feed, and Facebook page.
The Wiki Journal Project is intended to both make Wikipedia more scholarly and provide Open Access to peer-reviewed journal articles. Another option for making existing or current research more accessible for members of the ISU Community is to place it on ISU ReD. The Milner Library Scholarly Communication Team is happy to answer questions about placing your own materials on ISU ReD and what options are available. Creators do not surrender any of their copyrights by placing an item on ISU ReD, unless they specifically declare otherwise. Anyone wishing to make their own materials more readily available can often place pre-prints or even published articles and materials on ISU ReD.
If you wish to discuss these options further, for current or already published research, please contact Milner Library’s Scholarly Communication Team at isured@IllinoisState.edu.
Additional Reading from the Scholarly Communication Team
- Happy Domain Day 2021!
- Big Deals and the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts
- Deceptive publishers begone: Cabell’s Predatory Report is here
- “Create your own” through the public domain
- University Research Symposium hosted in ISU ReD
- A look at the Open Library of Humanities
- Finding Open Access journals and books
- Smithsonian open access
- Reusing others’ work with Creative Commons licenses
- Digitization of historical WGLT program guides informs broadcast history research
- Open Access Digital Theological Library
- Keeping it 100! Celebrating Milner’s contributions to ISU ReD
- How do you make a book free for everyone? Unglue.It
- Open Access publishing options
- Find free scholarly articles using the Unpaywall browser extension
- Historic ISNU enrollment ledgers now online
- Why submit to ISU ReD?
- Explore resources in the public domain
- Lever Press: an open access monograph publisher
- Oh, the places your thesis will go
- Educating Illinois on ISU ReD
- Finding open access resources using OAIster
- Illinois Shakespeare Festival programs now online
- UC library system says “no deal” to Elsevier
