Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/WikiJournal 2023/staffing plan
WikiJournal User Group
Open access • Publication charge free • Public peer review • Wikipedia-integrated
See also: 2022 staffing plan
Period: 1 January 2023 – 31 December 2023
As the publishing group of journals reach the point where
Executive Director[edit]
Load: 0.1 FTE[notes 1]
Duration: 1 January 2023 – 31 December, 2023 (12 months)
Description: The ED position will be a wide reaching role aimed to increase the Journals productivity, visibility and organization. Currently the Journal is run by volunteers, as such, speed of processing can be highly varied as commitments change throughout the year. A ED would be in charge of allocating projects and assuring they are completed on a timely basis. Additionally a large portion of the ED position will be to engage with others in the field to broaden the readership and authorship. The ED will also act as a critical point of contact for the Journal, allowing authors and readers a designated person to contact and respond to the many queries. Additionally, the ED would work to organize the processing of articles to assure the correct people are allocated to the jobs. They would also be tasked with the day to day runnings of the Journal. i.e. ensuring that the Website is up to date.
- The top priority of the ED is to clear the backlog of submitted articles that are still undergoing processing. The following strategies are likely most effective for this purpose:
- Regularly checking in on each article that is still in processing, with a greater focus on the ones with the oldest submission date.
- Asking the peer review coordinator what they need in order to move the article ahead to the next step. Considering if a technical editor can help, such as finding potential peer reviewers and providing their emails to the peer review coordinator.
- If one or more articles does not have an assigned peer review coordinator, or where additional coordinators are needed: encouraging current editorial board members and associate editors to take on volunteer work as peer review coordinators for such articles.
- Coordinate with HR to determine the technical requirements for this transition.
- Ensuring a growth of the project in terms of volunteers (authors, peer reviewers, editorial board members, associate editors etc.), including social media presence and additional outreach projects.
- Encouraging and overseeing improvements to the publishing processes and the administration thereof.
- Having authors write their articles directly online as much as possible. Compromises include the implementation of Open Journal Systems for article processing, but where the article file in that system only contains a link to the online wiki page with the article.
- Integration of material into Wikimedia projects whenever feasible, and encouragement of republishing fitting Wikipedia material in WikiJournal.
- Ensuring timely applications for funding from Wikimedia Foundation, and reporting thereof
Administrative Assistant[edit]
Load: 0.1 FTE[notes 1]
Duration: 1 January 2023 – 31 December, 2023 (12 months)
Description: The role of the administrative assistant would be to take the stress off current board members by completing administrative tasks. This job would include: managing technical editors, managing vendors, managing platforms we utilize, helping offload tasks from ED that are too high level for tech editors, assisting in preparing applications, coordinating schedules, and running meetings. The job may also include overseeing and managing the internal portal we are considering creating, track journal engagement, assisting in marketing campaigns.
Project Coordinators[edit]
Load: One-off stipend (intended to be distributed across 3 contractors)
Duration: 1 January 2023 – 31 December, 2023 (12 months)
Description: Project coordinators will be tasked with staying on top of individual articles and follow them from start to finish to ensure quality and organization along the way. They will detail jobs for technical editors, and manage the technical editors, as well as monitor the articles going through peer review - coordinating handling editors and reviewers.
We have budgeted 3 coordinators with a one-off stipend at $1000 for the year (one for each journal)
Technical Editors[edit]
Load: 1 FTE[notes 1] (currently distributed over 13 contractors)
Duration: 1 January 2023 – 31 December, 2023 (12 months)
Description: Key technical processing steps in the preparation, peer review and publishing of scholarly articles. It is a task-based role that will be dynamically distributed between multiple people. This includes: communications between relevant stakeholders, reformatting material between different formats, ensuring copyright compliance, ensuring that metadata is synchronised and up to date for articles, authors, reviewers, and editors, and depositing to relevant databases.
See also: Detailed role description, task outlines and task tracking
Back end development[edit]
Load: 1FTE[notes 1] (contractor)
Duration: 1 Apr, 2023 – 30 Jun, 2023 (3 months)
Description: Creation of a set automated API connections between Wikiversity (front-end content) Wikidata (metadata) and Open Journal Systems (back end editorial management), academic search engines, relevant usage tools, and required bots.
See also: Detailed task description and Technical wishlist
Organisation[edit]
All roles report to the Administrative board, who in turn ensure that the joint editorial boards are appraised of key activities. The administrative board will ensure consistent achievement of its mission, and oversight of its programs. This includes strategy development, operations oversight, community management, building external relations and collaborations and administration of the organization.
The infrastructure (including Bylaws modifications, responsibilities and guidelines) and subsequent election of a paid Chief Executive Officer would require aproval by the WikiJournal User Group community (see voting members here). The ED would report to the administrative board of WikiJournal.