Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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Nature's NEWS section has an article today, "Publish in Wikipedia or perish: Journal to require authors to post in the free online encyclopaedia", that reports that the journal RNA Biology will require authors who submit work to a new section of the journal, to be launched later this week that describes families of RNA molecules, to also create a Wikipedia entry summarizing the research.
From the piece:
The first paper scheduled is "A Survey of Nematode SmY RNAs"1; its corresponding Wikipedia summary can be found here.The goal is to encourage more scientists who work on RNA to get involved in creating and updating public data on RNA families, while being rewarded by the traditional method of a citable publication, says Sean Eddy, a computational biologist at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, and a co-author of the nematode article.
... The RNA wiki is a subset of a broader project, the WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology, which has marshalled hundreds of scientists to improve the content of biology articles in Wikipedia. It, in turn, is collaborating with the Novartis Research Foundation on GeneWiki, an effort to create Wikipedia articles describing every human gene. Beyond Wikipedia itself, scientists are also increasingly using wiki technology to get scientists to help curate other biological databases (see Nature 455, 22–25; 2008).
It should be noted that RNA Biology is a subscription-based journal. Access to articles in the journal are made freely available to all after a one year embargo. The University of Illinois does not yet have a subscription to this journal.
Posted by Katie Newman at December 18, 2008 11:37 AM
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