OpenWetWare talk:Publishing group/Reddit idea

• Who owns/controls reddit and does it matter? Endy 21:04, 8 August 2006 (EDT)
  • Jasonk 21:34, 8 August 2006 (EDT):Yeah, good question - I can't find their license, who owns the comments?
  • Lucks 21:40, 8 August 2006 (EDT): I know one of the Reddit founders (Chris Slowe), who is a grad student in the physics department at Harvard. The company is based in Somerville and is the big success of Paul Graham's and Robert Morris's (MIT Computer Science) VC firm Y-Combinator. I have been involved with them in creating arxiv.reddit.org, and at that time they were very enthusiastic about helping out science with their technology. They were also flexible in tayloring their technology for science needs, and aware of the concerns about a company involved with open content. Chris and I also talked with John Wilbanks at Science Commons about some of these issues with arxiv.reddit, and making all comments that appear on the cite covered by an appropriate creative commons license. I think they would be up for adopting OWW's policy. In the end they are a company, but one that wants to help science.
• Do we know if mediawiki is developing an equivalent system built in to their source base? Endy 21:04, 8 August 2006 (EDT)
  • Lucks 21:44, 8 August 2006 (EDT): It would be great if we could add a mediawiki extension and do everything ourselves from the view of not involving a company. However, reddit has designed a nice technology to deal with common problems of such a system (spam, posts on the 'hot' list don't stay up there forever but change with time, etc.) The drawback is that last time I looked arxiv.reddit had adds. I do know that they also license their product out. Perhaps a publishing house would like to pay for us to license their technology? These might be long-term thoughts.
  • Austin 22:23, 8 August 2006 (EDT): Look at the development OWW site. I just installed a Review extension which appears to have been developed for wikipedia but was not used for some reason. Each page under the toolbox has a per-user rating.
    • Lucks 22:29, 8 August 2006 (EDT):What is the url for the development site?
      • Lucks 22:33, 8 August 2006 (EDT): http://dev.openwetware.org
    • Lucks 22:38, 8 August 2006 (EDT): Very interesting. But if every page has the option of being reviewed, that brings up Jason's point below.
• Jasonk 21:47, 8 August 2006 (EDT):This is in the "things to think more about" section now, but I think it's something we'd have to address before rolling this out: Can anyone on OWW submit any page? If so this presents two problems: (1) I can get "credit" (reddit karma) for submitting someone else's good protocol (2) The actual author of the protocol may not have wanted to have it rated by users, or put into a DOI final form. (e.g. they still consider it a work in progress). I don't want to discourage contribution to OWW because people are afraid of having their rough drafts torn into.
  • Jasonk 21:49, 8 August 2006 (EDT):p.s. I very much like the idea of trialing a system that involves ratings, I just want to make sure we think about the way it might affect users who don't want to use it.
  • Lucks 21:56, 8 August 2006 (EDT): Seems like there are 2 levels of control. One on OWW that might limit who can make posts (i.e. we could ask reddit to restrict posting to a certain button displayed on OWW only for those people who are authors on the current page), the other on how reddit assigns karma. As it is now, there is only one user associated with each post - perhaps they could change that to be multiple users - the authors and the poster. I would almost say keep the one user assignment, but only let authors post content. That way it is only posted if people feel like the work is complete. All users would be free to post news items or interesting papers like on arxiv.reddit.
  • Kathleen 23:29, 8 August 2006 (EDT): I'm a bit concerned about who is "allowed" to post pages to a journal. For instance, even if you limit it to just authors of a particular page, there is nothing to prevent me from making a minor edit on a page, thereby becoming an author of that page, and then posting it. Additionally, what about a situation in which two people contribute equally to a page yet only one person can post it? There is definitely a difference between posting something on a wiki and "publishing" it. I think we should tread cautiously on this one.
• Kathleen 23:29, 8 August 2006 (EDT): I also wanted to bring up a point about further editing once something is "published". Are authors allowed to continue editing a publication after it has been posted to the OWW journal (say, in response to comments made)? Should there be an "in review" section where things are pre-published to allow for comments for a period of time? Then, things could be revised, potentially posted to a "post review" section and then finally "published"? This largely takes the current publishing model and makes all steps open (free access to information), but maintains some of the good aspects of traditional scientific publishing, such as critical peer review before things "go live". Just some things to think about.