OpenWetWare:Publishing group/Reddit idea

OpenWetWare.org Novel Publishing Proposal

OWW is in a unique position with its open-minded user base to start to develop novel platforms for the publication of scientific information. As it stands, OWW provides an online collaborative tool that is used to generate and share scientific knowledge and progress. We wish to add functionality to OWW to enable the day-to-day content to be published in an open, online system with community review.

Here's how it might work 1.) Scientific investigations are carried out on OWW by making pages, putting up results and discussions, etc. 2.) When a page is 'publishable', the user clicks the 'Publish to OWWJournal' button on OWW that posts that page to openwetware.reddit.com. 3.) Every posted on OWWJ has an associated DOI, score and vote up/downn buttons. The community of users can vote up/down as to what they think of the post. be ranked based on score. Posts can also be commented on, and those comments can be ranked. 4.) The OWWJ site would publish RSS feeds of the new articles. 5.) Authors who post articles that are voted high gain reputation. At anytime, users can view the reputation of the author.

OpenWetWare.reddit.com Based on the example of arxiv.reddit.com, an extension of the reddit.com website taylored for physics research news, we propose to create OpenWetWare.reddit.com to handle the voting and comment system. This could be a trial run to see how the system works. It would allow users to post pages from OWW. Reddit could also create a bookmarklet browser button "post to OWW" (http://reddit.com/bookmarklets).

Reddit embedded into OpenWetWare, showing the latest news, research and recent changes. [OWW_reddit_front_page]

Benefits for the OWW Community Authors receive community reviews of their work through voting and comments. Readers receive a what's hot view of the recent OWW changes. Other relevant news could also be published.

Involing existing publishing channel Existing publishing channels should be approached as they may be interested in sponsoring this experiment. They benefit from the knowledge gained and from being associated with our community.

Example in use: iGEM ideas and results, BioSysBio conference abstracts Bearing in mind that reddit.com is an out-of-the-box working system that might not be the final solution. We propose to try this model out with the iGEM project pages and the BioSysBio conference abstracts.