Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/WikiJournal 2024

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statusAwaiting grantee reply
WikiJournal 2024
start date2024-07-01
end date2025-07-01
budget (local currency)161919 USD
grant typeWikimedia Affiliate (chapter, thematic org., or user group)
funding regionNA
decision fiscal year2023-24
funding program roundRound 2
organization (if applicable)WikiJournal

This is an automatically generated Meta-Wiki page. The page was copied from Fluxx, the grantmaking web service of Wikimedia Foundation where the user has submitted their application. Please do not make any changes to this page because all changes will be removed after the next update. Use the discussion page for your feedback. The page was created by CR-FluxxBot.

Applicant information[edit]

Organization name or Wikimedia Username for individuals. (required)
WikiJournal
Do you have any approved General Support Fund requests? (required)
Yes, I have already applied and received a General Support Fund
You are applying as a(n). (required)
Wikimedia Affiliate (chapter, thematic org., or user group)
Are your group or organization legally registered in your country? (required)
Yes
Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
No
Fiscal organization name.
N/A

Main proposal[edit]

1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be a title for the Meta-Wiki page. (required)
WikiJournal 2024
2. Do you want to apply for the multi-year funding or renewal process? (required)
No
2.1. For how many years of multi-year funding are you applying? (required)
N/A
2.2. Provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan? (required)

N/A


3. Proposed start date. (required)
2024-07-01
4. Proposed end date. (required)
2025-07-01
5. Does your organization or group have an Affiliate or Organizational Annual Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required)
Yes
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Simple/Applications/WikiJournal_User_Group/2024/annual_plan
6. Does your affiliate, organization or group have a Strategic Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required)
Yes
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group/3-year_plan_(2021-2024)
7. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
International (more than one country across continents or regions)
Our Team is geographically diverse. Our journal is legally based in the US, with our founder being Swedish-born and currently living in the US. Our Executive Director is currently based in Australia. The administrative assistant is based in the UK. Our technical editors are from Africa, Europe, Australia, and North America. Our volunteers span all 6 continents including Sweden, Ireland, USA, Australia, Belgium, India, UK, Egypt, Australia, Brazil, USA, Germany, South Africa, Canada, Italy, France, Switzerland, Korea, Finland, Canada, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Israel, Czechia, Nepal, Netherlands, Russia, and China. During our grant period, we hope to engage even more communities. In addition to our geographically diverse team, we also continue to reach out to more communities. While as an organisation we promote the open and accessible nature of our Journal, we also acknowledge that different communities face different barriers to interacting. We have recently had a WikiJournals presentation translated into Spanish. As we now have outreach material in multiple languages, we hope to utilise this to increase exposure to previously difficult-to-reach populations.
8. What are your programs, approaches, and strategies? What are the challenges that you are trying to address and how will your strategies support you in addressing these challenges? (required)

The WikiJournals are already enriching Wikimedia projects by bringing in globally diverse subject experts, some of whom are attracted by the possibility of publication in a scholarly journal. The potential for improving both the quality and depth of Wikimedia projects is clearly enormous, However, we are still very small in scale, and growth has been slow, so we have identified scaling up as a primary challenge. The obstacles include a lack of awareness of our initiative in the scholarly community, a perception that contributing would not result in career awards in academia and scholars’ lack of familiarity with the Wikimedia interface and the poor usability of the cobbled-together Wikiversity and Wikijournal infrastructure.

Our main program is the publication of a set of open-access, peer-reviewed academic journals with no publishing costs to authors. This approach supports our main objectives in bridging the Wikimedia-academia divide, and in providing a fully fee-free non-paywalled way to share quality-assured knowledge (including original research). In 2023, the project rejected 58% of the submissions as they were deemed to be of poor quality, lacked academic rigour, or involved ethical violations (as per Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines). The remaining 42% of the submissions were either accepted and published, are still undergoing reviews, or submission awaiting handling editors.

The strategies involve several threads. Firstly, continued outreach to new subject matter experts, as the model involves non-wikimedian authors and peer reviewers who often only contribute for a very short period to a single article, but that contribution is substantial and uniquely high quality – and consequently what in other projects would be considered high turnover in this cohort is incorporated into the strategy. Supporting this is the ongoing development and improvement of the platform, technologies, processes, and norms for how to run academic journals on wiki.

A key challenge is the constant, highly tailored outreach needed to potential contributors. Those in an author role need the value proposition of contributing articulated in the context of their particular field of expertise. Those in the peer reviewer role need to be extremely closely matched in expertise. The strategy builds on our experience in managing these 1:1 tailored contact activities and broader outreach. In particular, we look to continue reaching new communities of subject matter experts as potential authors, identifying and attracting the most relevant specific peer reviewers for submitted articles, and improving the experience of these cohorts once engaged (e.g. by improving our timely handling of the administrative steps inherent to academic publishing).

Another challenge we face is that low-quality submissions still require project coordinators’ time and effort to read the submission, inform the decision of the authors of those submissions, and update the rejection status of the preprint page. While this ensures that only high-quality submissions are published in WikiJournals, the rejected submissions do not appear in the publication statistics even though they take up time and labour.

To accomplish our long-term goals and mitigate the challenges we face we have also designated some more immediate goals for 2024 to aid in our overall mission. Our aims in 2024 are to bring in more communities, expand/build more partnerships, and increase engagement by the academics already associated with the Wikijournals.

One of our primary goals for 2024 is to bring in more communities to participate in WikiJournals. WikiJournals prides itself on its global diversity and bringing open-access academic publishing to all. While the accessibility of our Journal is a priority, there are barriers besides cost that limit the ability to use the WikiJournals. By tackling some of these barriers we are hoping to bring in more engagement from underrepresented communities. Language still remains a significant barrier to engagement. As such we have had a WikiJournal presentation translated into Spanish to increase our potential audience. In 2024 we will be tracking our international involvement quarterly with a specific interest in non-English articles published/submitted. This may include an abstract section or an entire article translated into other languages for non-English readers. Additionally, we have found that outreach events are key to increasing our engagement, with in-person conferences and meetings particularly successful in bringing in different communities. In 2024 we are hoping to send board members to a variety of outreach events to educate others on WikiJournals. We are also fortunate to have a globally diverse team, who have helped to increase outreach within their own communities, and in 2024 we have asked our board members to continue their outreach within their communities.

Another goal for 2024 is to build partnerships specifically with universities. As an academic journal, academic partnerships would be particularly beneficial in increasing engagement and awareness of the Journal. Through such partnerships, we are hoping to be able to recruit additional authors and editors by promoting the open access and free at the point of publishing nature of the Journal. We note that Wikipedia has been successful in partnering with university teachers for student projects to add to Wikipedia, and we hope to emulate that success, in part by creating new promotional and informational materials that target academics. We hope in future years to bring this to universities in more underrepresented areas, where funding may pose a more significant problem to researchers and postgraduate students to facilitate access to quality educational resources. We are currently in discussions with universities about integrating Wikipedia and WikiJournals into university curricula, specifically within master's programs. If we are able to introduce WikiJournals into these programs, we will be able to not only engage more people, but many of those affected will be the younger generation, drawing more youth into both Wikimedia and academic publications. We have tasked a few board members to begin communications with their affiliated universities. By utilising board member affiliations we hope to create a “template” for university partnerships that we will be able to deploy with other Universities as our capacity increases. To facilitate this goal, we are tracking our communication progress throughout each quarter to ensure that we are progressing with our partnership opportunities.

In addition to outward-facing goals, in 2024 we are also hoping to internally build engagement and focus on internal reflection. By spending more time and resources to develop our internal infrastructure it will facilitate better output and fewer complications with our processes. We have received feedback from some board members that they find the ways to get involved are difficult, especially if they have limited Wiki knowledge. In 2024 we are aiming to create a document to help non-experienced associate editors and editorial board members find ways to meaningfully participate, as well as running workshops for those who want extra help. To determine the efficacy of our engagement we will be conducting quarterly surveys to see how we are doing and if there is anything people need additional help with. We hope that by building our internal engagement it will be positively reflected in the output of our Journal.

9. What categories are your main programs and related activities under? Please select all that apply. (required)
Category Yes/No
Education Yes
Culture, heritage or GLAM No
Gender and diversity No
Community support and engagement No
Participation in campaigns and contests No
Public policy advocacy Yes
Other No

Education

9.1.1. Select all your programs and activities for Education. (required)
Editing Wikipedia Training, Research, Wikimedia Commons programs, Other activities
Other programs and activities if any: WikiJournals Provides a medium for academic publishing.
9.1.2. Select all relevant audience groups for Education. (required)
Vocational, tertiary, or higher education, Teachers or professors, Other groups
Other groups if any: All people interested in peer reviewed and original research

Public policy advocacy

9.6.1. What specific laws, or legislative topics, are you targeting with your advocacy plans? Please be as specific as possible. (required)

Our advocacy primarily focuses on advancing open-access academic publishing, aligning with the principles of the UNESCO Open Science/Knowledge movement. We oppose paywall access, viewing it as contradictory to these principles. Furthermore, we ardently support the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those pertaining to universal access to quality education. Through our efforts to facilitate paywall-free access and underscore the significance of open-access academic publishing, we actively contribute to the Open Knowledge movement, advocating for Open Science/Knowledge and quality education.

9.6.2. What are the main methods and tactics via which you plan to advocate for this public policy change? Please be as specific as possible. (required)

Our initiative is deeply entrenched in the advocacy for open access, making every endeavour we undertake inherently tied to the promotion of open knowledge. Our approach employs a multifaceted strategy utilizing presentations, infographics, and word-of-mouth advocacy to disseminate information. Currently, we're actively collaborating with universities to emphasize the significance of open access and to mobilize a new generation of scholars to participate in both WikiJournals and the broader open knowledge movement.

9.6.3. Approximately, how much of the requested budget will you dedicate to public policy advocacy (local currency)?
5000
10. Please include a link to or upload a timeline (operational calendar) for your programs and activities. (required)
See upload.
11. Describe your team. (required)

The staff roles that involve pay are described at (note these roles are the same as previous years). https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Community_Fund/WikiJournal_2023/staffing_plan

These positions are not employees, but rather contractors since all are part time, casual, or as a small stipend.

The positions are currently filled by: Executive Director = Thomas Shafee Administrative Assistant = Ellen Sussman Project Coordinators = Andrew Leung & Roger Watson (third potential position currently vacant) Technical Editors = Peter Nkashi Agan, Natalie Charamut, Emma Chiu, Michelle Fong, Jenna Harmon, Cody Naccarato, Logan Smith, Stephnie Watson, Andrew Neil & Katrina Alcorn

The main members of the team are the joint editorial boards and ‘associate editors’ of the journals. They are listed and described at https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group/Editors. These are the on-going members engaged in the role of coordinating the activities of the User Group, in particular the liaison with non-Wikimedian contributors (potential and current authors, potential and current peer reviewers.

12. Will you be working with any internal (Wikimedia) or external partners? Describe the characteristics of these partnerships and bring a few examples of the most significant partnerships. (required)

We will be working more closely with WikiEdu and several thematic affiliates (especially Wiki Project Med, Wikipedia & Education User Group and Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network User Group) as well as geographical user groups and chapters (initially English-speaking countries) as outreach avenues to reach additional potential academic contributors. In 2024 we will be supporting various Wikimedia chapters and user groups by publishing their activities as conference proceedings in our Humanities journal. We will also be working with Wiki Project Med on exploring the potential for hosting outside of Wikiversity whilst the proposal for a sister project platform continues to be processed by the WMF and board of trustees.

The goal over the upcoming years is to attract a continued growth of participants, in the editorial boards as well as authors and peer reviewers. This year we have resumed in-person outreach at a number of events: EduWiki Conference 2023 in Serbia in May, Wikimania 2023 in Singapore in August, and open access week in late October in partnership with Wikimedia Colombia. We now have a YouTube video with Spanish interpretation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8UQrrOLzW4) which will support our outreach activities in Spanish-speaking countries. We also presented our project virtually in collaboration with Wikimedia Ukraine at the Wiki Community Educators Conference in July. These activities have successfully increased the number of subject matter experts volunteering to serve on WikiJournal editorial boards. We had a representative attending the Canadian Science Policy Conference in Ottawa, Canada in November to participate in open publishing discussions.

Significant external partners include the publishing group PLOS, which we are assisting in migrating their content from a custom wiki over to the same space that our user group uses within Wikiversity. In addition to that back catalogue, they are interested in exploring potential future publication formats (specifically ‘living review articles’) that take advantage of features of on-wiki publishing.

Additionally, WikiJournal is working with STARDIT, which has been supported by Wikimedia Australia. STARDIT focuses on collaboration and transparency. By creating trackable reports, “living” journal articles can be created, allowing for continuous development and increased collaboration, while maintaining academic rigour. This partnership will become of increasing importance in the future with the rise of AI-generated content, by having a transparent process and a method to demonstrate how human authors are involved in the creation of our content.

During the 2024 grant period, we also initiated discussions with select universities globally to determine the feasibility of incorporating Wiki and WikiJournals into the curriculum. We will pilot this first with a few select universities that our board members are affiliated with to help guide the conversations. Through this partnership, we are hoping to be able to recruit additional authors and editors by promoting the open access and free at the point of publishing nature of the Journal. We hope in future years to bring this to universities in more underrepresented areas, where funding may pose a more significant problem to researchers and postgraduate students to facilitate access to quality educational resources. By providing free at the point of publishing and reading peer-reviewed articles we aim to reduce inequalities within the academic research environment and promote quality educational materials, helping to promote the UN sustainable development goals.

13. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select all that apply. (required)
Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement, Improve User Experience, Provide for Safety and Inclusion, Coordinate Across Stakeholders, Innovate in Free Knowledge, Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt

Metrics[edit]

Wikimedia Metrics[edit]

14. Please select and fill out Wikimedia Metrics for your proposal. (recommended)
14.1. Number of participants, editors, and organizers.

All metrics provided are optional, please fill them out if they are aligned with your programs and activities.

Participants, editors, and organizers
Metrics name Target Description
Number of all participants 150 We have more than 150 participants . Our main participants are authors and reviewers, however, we have a large (not documented) number of individuals that are participating via outreach and training as potential authors and peer reviewers.
Number of all editors N/A N/A
Number of new editors N/A
Number of retained editors N/A
Number of all organizers 90 Our organisers include all WikiJournal Boards (majority of organisers), executive director (1), project coordinators (3), administrative assistant (1), and the technical editors (11).
Number of new organizers N/A
14.2. Number of new content contributions to Wikimedia projects. (recommended)
Contributions to Wikimedia projects
Wikimedia project Created Edited or improved
Wikipedia 5 5
Wikimedia Commons 20 20
Wikidata 10 25
Wiktionary
Wikisource
Wikimedia Incubator
Translatewiki
MediaWiki
Wikiquote
Wikivoyage
Wikibooks
Wikiversity 40 40
Wikinews
Wikispecies
Wikifunctions / Abstract Wikipedia
Description for Wikimedia projects contributions metrics. (optional)

Our contributions include editing and improving articles that originate as a standalone English Wikipedia article. There may be additional opportunities for contributions in non-English Wikipedia content, based on the proficiency and willingness of the authors. For research-oriented studies, the images or multimedia will be uploaded as new contributions to Commons. Our metadata is primarily populated through Wikidata. We create new Wikidata entries for authors and reviewers, or update them if their entries already exist. While the scope of our Wiki contributions are difficult to capture, we have noted that contributions from our articles have been viewed extensively such as some contributions to wikicommons and other wikipedia pages that have received over 200,000 views this year.

Other Metrics[edit]

15. Do you have other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required)
Yes
Other Metrics Description Target
Submission We aim to have at least 40 new article submissions each year. For more information on the metrics please refer to the attached metrics document. 40
Citations We aim to have at least 5 new article academic citations each year. For more information on the metrics please refer to the attached metrics document. N/A
N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A

Budget[edit]

16. Will you have any other revenue sources when implementing this proposal (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required)
No
16.1. List other revenue sources. (required)

N/A

16.2. Approximately how much revenue will you have from other sources in your local currency? (required)
N/A
17. Your local currency. (required)
USD
18. What is the total requested amount in your local currency? (required)
161919 USD
Multi-year funding request summary
Year Amount (local currency)
Year 1 N/A USD
Year 2 N/A USD
Year 3 N/A USD
19. Does this proposal include compensation for staff or contractors? (required)
Yes
19.1. How many paid staff members do you plan to have? (required)

Include the number of staff and contractors during the proposal period. If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include them separately and mention their terms.

The General Support fund will be used to pay our contractors. Currently all individuals that work with WikiJournals are independent contractors. The Executive Director and Administrative assistant are independent contractors but work consistently 4 hours per week. We also have 10 Technical editors that have variable hours depending on the demand of the journal. We also have 3 Project coordinators.
19.2. How many FTEs (full-time equivalents) in total? (required)

Include the total FTE of staff and contractors during the proposal period. If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include their FTEs with the terms separately.

The General Support Fund will cover 1.45 FTEs

CEO = 0.15 FTE Administrative Assistant = 0.15 FTE Project Coordinators = .15 FTE (distributed amongst 3) Technical Editors = 1 FTE (distributed amongst 10 - depending on demand)

19.3. Describe any staff or contractor changes compared to the current year / ongoing General Support Fund if any. (required only for returning grantees)
The staff/contractors have not changed significantly since the previous grant. We have 1 less technical editor, however the workload remains {slight increase}.
20. Please provide an overview of your overall budget categories in your local currency. The budget breakdown should include only the amount requested with this General Support Fund (required).
Budget category Amount in local currency
Staff and contractor costs 97005 USD
Operational costs 66919 USD
Programmatic costs 15996 USD
21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)

Additional information[edit]

22. In this optional space you can add any other additional information about your proposal or organization that you think can help us when reviewing your proposal. (optional)

WikiJournals is still in the process of becoming a Sister Project. We understand that this is outside the scope of the grant committee but it may help to understand the future of WikiJournals emphasising the continual pursuit of growth and forward development. https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group/Applications/WMF_Sister_Project

This last quarter we have done a lot of self reflection to help better WikiJournals. We have recently implemented a progress tracking document to help our organisation keep on track and reflect back regularly to assess any shortcomings. We have also been working hard to promote increased engagement with our board members and we are currently working on creating a guide to help editors, reviewers, and authors engage in WikiJournals, specifically for those with less Wiki experience.

By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.

We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.

Yes

Feedback[edit]

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