(RNA molecule image at Wikimedia Commons)
Is the future of science publishing unfolding in the free-for-all of Wikipedia?
Yesterday Nature reported that RNA Biology, which publishes research on families of RNA molecules, announced it will begin requiring that geneticists who submit their work to the journal agree to write a Wikipedia entry summarizing their findings. They’ve done so with the noble goal of using “the opportunities of mixed science publishing to bring reliable research resources to wider scientific and lay audiences,” as editor-in-chief Renee Schroeder wrote in the press release accompanying the announcement. It’s a curious twist that embraces in part the Googlish mantra that more data is better data, but puts the breaks on the more troubling fact that anyone who accesses Wikipedia faces: the authority of the information found on its pages. Those Wikipedia entries will themselves be peer-reviewed.
I wonder about this model for other academic publishing — while it seems a terrific way to make primary scientific research available to the public at large, and should have the salutary effect of increasing the number of quality, vetted entries in Wikipedia, site vandalism is an ongoing concern, among other things. Wikipedia has attempted to fight the problem of scurrilous editing through its FlaggedRevs software, a sort of internal checking system that allows friendly users to validate pages. (This has long been a contentious issue at Wikipedia, for it seems to run counter to the truth-will-win-out long-view philosophy that underwrites the creative anarchy of the site.) But it will be interesting to see if other scholarly publishers follow suit — particularly those in the humanities and social sciences.
