Just imagine if all authors currently writing up manuscripts about a subject were instead to coordinate their efforts by collaborating on a single but detailed and balanced citable reference in which the topic would be described in and linked to all relevant contexts, updated as new research results pass peer review.

Since the advent of printed scholarly periodicals in the late Middle Ages, context in scientific communication has mainly been established by providing each of these publication venues (now collectively referred to as journals) with a scope, typically in terms of topics or methods covered, or with respect to a perceived threshold in newsworthiness.

Besides establishing context, the scope also defined the audience -- and thus indirectly the number of printed copies, their pricing and their distribution amongst individuals and institutions -- as well as criteria to be met by manuscripts in order to be considered for publication. Given the scope of a particular journal, consequently, knowledge about specialist terms (which may describe completely non-congruent concepts in different fields), methodologies, notations, mainstream opinions, trends or major controversies could reasonably be expected to be widespread amongst the audience, which reduced the need of redundantly repeating the same things all over and again. Interestingly, redundancy is still quite visible nonentheless, especially in the introductory, methods and discussion sections and the abstracts, often in a way characteristic of the authors (such that services like eTBLAST and JANE can make qualified guesses on authors of a particular piece of text, with good results if some of the authors have a lot of papers in the respective database, mainly PubMed, and if they have not changed their individual research scope too often in between).

Of course, there would be side effects: A manuscript well-adapted to the scope of one particular journal is often not very intelligible to someone outside its intended audience, which hampers cross-fertilization with other research fields (we will get back to this below). When using paper as the sole medium of communication, there is not much to be done about this limitation, and we got so used to it that few indeed would perceive it as a limitation at all. However, the times when paper alone reigned over scholarly communication have certainly passed.

So, in principle, the online version of a manuscript could link directly to any appropriate source of information (even blogs, for that matter, if no better source is available or accessible; see here for an example) but in current practice, linking is usually achieved paper-style, i.e. indirectly, via a list of references which itself is often not linked to online versions (let alone openly accessible ones) of the references in question, even though Uniform Resource Identifiers like DOI and SRef have been around for about a decade now, and International Standard Book Numbers longer still.

The above-mentioned hampered cross-field fertilization is crucial with respect to interdisciplinary research projects, digital libraries and multi-journal (or indeed cross-disciplinary) bibliographic search engines (e.g. Google Scholar), since these dramatically increased the likelihood of, say, a biologist stumbling upon a not primarily biological source relevant to her research (think shape quantification or growth curves, for instance). What options do we have to integrate these cross-disciplinary hidden treasures with the traditional intra-disciplinary background knowledge?

Interestingly, lack of context is also a consistent feature of most "Facebooks for scientists" (including ways.org which hosts this blog) - in fact, the whole set of scholarly pages on the www is the appropriate network for researchers but so far it is not optimally connected, particularly because formal scholarly communication has not yet fully hatched from the structures it had during the paper-based era (see also this nice overview of the current situation). Just imagine if all authors currently writing up manuscripts about a subject were instead to coordinate their efforts by collaborating on a single but detailed and balanced citable reference in which the topic would be described in and linked to all relevant contexts, updated as new research results pass peer review. Of course, this would shift the focus away from periodicals (and, in passing, render things like a journal's scope and Impact Factor superfluous), which is likely to meet resistance from the publishing establishment.

Groupware comes to mind in this regard, and wikis in particular: They allow to aggregate and inter-link diverse sets of knowledge in an online-accessible manner, basically for free. The by now classical example are the Wikipedias, and one scientific journal - RNA biology - has already announced that it requires an introductory Wikipedia article for papers it is to publish on RNA families, an idea that recently spurred an ongoing debate on the merits of such an initiative and of doing it with Wikipedia.

An investigation (video lecture by Bill Wedemeyer here, my brief annotation here) of the quality of a set of science articles in the English Wikipedia is currently being written up for classical paper-style publication but the preliminary results indicate that "[t]here is a subset of reliably helpful science articles on the English Wikipedia for outreach, teacher training, and general science education" (slide shown at 29:35min in the video). However, the distribution of the set of articles was skewed towards the Good Article and Featured Article classes which constituted only 2% of the English Wikipedia at the time of investigation, and it did not include articles in the humanities (they come next).

Furthermore, the larger Wikipedias have a serious problem with vandalism: take an article of your choice and look in its history page for reverts - most of them will be about changes like this or worse. This is less of an issue with more popular topics for which large numbers of volunteers may be available to correct spammy entries but it is probably fair to assume that most researchers value their time too much to spend it on repeatedly correcting such information if it had already been correctly entered once. Other problems with covering scientific topics at Wikipedia include the notability criteria which have to be fulfilled to avoid an article being deleted, and the rejection of "original research" in the sense of not having been peer reviewed before publication. Peer review is indeed an important aspect of scholarly communication, as it paves the way towards the reproducibility that forms one of the foundations of modern science. Yet I know of no compelling reason to believe that it works better before than after publication (doing it beforehand was just a practical decision in times when journal space was measured in paper pages).

Fortunately, the Wikipedias are not the only wikis around, and amongst the more scholarly inclined alternatives, there are even a number of wiki-based journals, though usually with a very narrow scope and/ or a low number of articles. On the contrary, Citizendium, Scholarpedia (which has classical peer review and an ISSN and may thus be counted as a wiki journal, too), OpenWetWare and the Wikiversities are cross-disciplinary and structured (as well as sized, for the moment) such that vandalism and notability are not really a problem (with minor exceptions, real names are required at the first three, and anybody can write about anything, particularly their fields of expertise). None of these is even close to providing the vast amount of context existing in the English Wikipedia but they might perhaps if the latter were broken down to scholarly useful stuff, as discussed above. Out of these four wikis, only OpenWetWare and some Wikiversities (here counted as one) currently allow for original research to be published on their site - in the case of OpenWetWare, this is indeed the main purpose.

Further, a number of more specialized scholarly wikis exist (e.g. WikiGenes, the Encyclopedia of Earth, the Encyclopedia of the Cosmos, or the Dispersive PDE Wiki) which can teach us about the usefulness of wikis within specific academic fields. I will not dwell on details here but instead list a number of features I deem desirable for future scholarly wikis, derived from experience with existing ones. These include, in no particular order:

• search engines that integrate or otherwise compare favourably with major scholarly search engines on the web (the already mentioned Google Scholar and PubMed as well as, say, the BioText Search Engine that searches Open Access text and images)
• pan-disciplinary scope, with consistent disambiguation of specialist terms (mainly but not fully achieved at Citizendium)
• some system of peer review (basically, any wiki allows to leave comments, annotations or formal reviews on talk pages of users or articles but these ratings should be featured more prominently; templates like those visualizing article status at Citizendium may help with that); this may be as simple as disallowing individuals to add information to Citizendium when the only available support is their own non-reviewed research published at OpenWetWare - the real name policy will minimize misuse
• the uploadability of all kinds of media (including videos, which are blocked at the Wikipedias but allowed at Citizendium, for instance, and the scope of the Journal of Visualized Experiments) that traditionally (if you can call a habit that barely is a decade old a tradition already) went along with paper-based publications as "supporting online information" (which would be easily integrated in an all-online article with no sharp space limitations)
• stable versions for contents that has undergone peer review (like the Approved Articles at Citizendium), along with draft versions for anything else (including improvements to and updates of previous stable versions); like any non-protected page at the Wikipedias, these draft versions can serve as a playground, though a real-name policy would probably make it a more educational one
• a separate namespace for references (already in use at the Dispersive PDE Wiki and the French Wikipedia, in test at Citizendium); as a side line, this would open up ways for new citation metrics, via the What links here function
• attributability of contributions (automatically realized, though not in the traditional scholarly way, in any wiki with a real name policy like that at Citizendium, via the User contributions function; special arrangements exist at Scholarpedia and WikiGenes; OpenWetWare does allow nicknames but real names prevail; the Wikiversities have basically the same user name policy as the Wikipedias)
• easy download of selected sets of pages for local archiving by individual researchers
• licenses that allow unrestricted reuse and derivative work if the original source is properly acknowledged (typically CC-by-SA or the older GFDL, both of which are hopefully going to be compatible soon)
• resource-effective design (see also discussions on the energy use of the internet and individual websites)
• integration with the non-scholarly world (certainly achieved in the Wikipedias and Citizendium), particularly with students (cf. the Eduzendium initiative at Citizendium) and non-English contents
• automation of the formatting, as already common in non-wiki environments, e.g. with LaTeX templates (none of the wikis I know comes close to that, albeit templates are heavily used at the various Wikipedias and, to a lesser extent but in a more consistent manner, at Citizendium; they seem to be rather rarely used on smaller or more specialized wikis); the same applies to references, though automated wikificationhas already progressed considerably here, despite the lack of wiki export functions at publisher's sites (or of suitable XML-to-wiki converters for those who provide XML)

One of the most useful templates in use at Citizendium is that for subpages (open the Biology article in a separate window to see what this is about) :  

• The article's main page is a stable version, approved by an author with expertise in that field
• Next comes the Talk tab that leads to the discussion page, as per default in any wiki
• the Draft tab leads to the editable version (this only applies for articles that have already been approved; in others, the main page is editable)
• the Related Articles tab roughly corresponds to "see also" in the Wikipedias but is more usefully structured for navigation and somewhat replaces the categories which are heavily used in Wikipedia but only to a limited extent at Citizendium
• there are further subpages: Bibliography for further reading, External Links, Gallery, Video and so on

It is interesting to see that these individual subpages largely complement existing social networking tools and have thus the potential to replace them (or to be replaced by them), at least for scholarly purposes:

• the Bibliography subpage is a context-based alternative to CiteULike, Zotero, BibSonomy and other reference managers, possibly in conjunction with Open Library, scholarly search engines and tools like Scribd or Papers. One problem wikis cannot solve is that of access to paper-based research publications but due to the current spread of Green and Gold Open Access initiatives, this is likely to change in the next few years anyway.
• the External Links subpage is a context-based alternative to conventional social bookmarking as known from delicious and simpy 
• Additional subpages could be tailored to meet the needs of individual categories of articles (e.g. properties of chemical elements, genes, stellar constellations etc.) or more general scholarly needs (e.g. peer review, slides, code, protocols, or bot-generated transcripts from video lectures)

Besides, User pages may provide context-based alternatives to individual pages at different networking sites, and possibly even to blogs like this one, while the Recent changes page could turn into an alternative for friendfeed, with items on your Watchlist (if you are logged in) equivalent to friendfeed rooms or personal feeds you are subscribed to. For the record, this social networking component of Citizendium has already been discussedtwo years ago, prior to its official launch and thus at a time when many of its current structures and their implications were not known yet.

Finally, and importantly, the easy availability of context (once the system would be reasonably well adopted by scholarly communities, and the encyclopedic corpus thus reasonably complete) would make it more easy to guide expert attention and thus to identify obvious gaps in current knowledge (e.g. by means of an expert evaluation of items listed on the Most Wanted page), and science funders could then issue a call for research proposals on such topics (e.g. via a Calls subpage, InnoCentive, Mechanical Turk or by more traditional means). And while we are at it, I think science funders, job committees and review panels would profit from familiarizing themselves with the workings of wikis, particularly the aspects relevant to reliability, attribution, and outreach (your organization, company or university probably has a page on Wikipedia - take a look at it, along with its history and talk pages, and you will almost certainly find something to improve).

To sum up, the still fledgling Citizendium currently seems to be the closest match for a cross-disciplinary scholarly wiki anchored in the real world, and independent of whether it will allow original research to be posted in the future or not, this essential function in scholarly communication can be fulfilled by OpenWetWare (indeed, a similar separation of powers is one of the most healthy elements of most democracies). If widely adopted, this would entail a major shift in the way research is being done and communicated, towards what has come to be known as open science. As a side effect, commercial publishers would have to look for new things to publish, other than original research (non-commercial publishers like scholarly societies may, after the usual period of resistance, see more advantages than disadvantages in the groupware model). Reviews at different levels of expertise may be one option, and tutorials or other learning tools another but all this could be done via some intelligently structured set of groupware, too, depending on the incentives involved (in fact, such reviews are the scope of Scholarpedia). A side effect for researchers would be that they could use the author fees, page and figure charges and all the other money currently required to publish a paper for other purposes.

Of course, there are potential problems with such an enormous concentration of knowledge (e.g. for attacks and misuse, especially in relation to an international author identification that is currently being discussed). The obvious solutions are appropriate mirroring and otherwise transparency. Similar concerns would apply to a journal like PLoS ONE that does not have a scope in the traditional paper-limited sense mentioned above, yet one year after launch, it is doing pretty well, and my guess is that if it were to adopt a symbiosis with a suitable wiki in a way similar to the RNA Biology initiative, it may even do better.

As a next step, I wish to go into more detail concerning the relative merits of paper-based and wiki-based scholarly communication. So I started a Wikiversity page on wikis in scholarly communication and invite you to add to it (I chose Wikiversity such that those who object to real name policies may make their voice heard, too, and I think I can deal with spam should it arise there). This overview may also help in working out an ecological footprint scheme applicable to research, as described previously.

I dedicate this post to my granny who passed away last week.

This post is meant as a contribution to Open Access Day (OA day) which strives to raise awareness - amongst researchers, research funders, academic publishers, students, politicians and the public - of the importance of Open Access (to literature containing peer-reviewed results of scientific investigations, that is) for our global society.

One way to do this is to have people like you blog in synchronization, i.e. on four questions during OA day. To give you some inspiration on the topic, you may wish to take a look at the first such synch-blogging entry, which came from Neil Saunders, based at the University of Queensland, Australia.

I will follow Neil's formatting to address the four questions:

1. Why does Open Access matter to you?

OA, for me, marks a turning point within the scientific cycle, i.e. the iterative process which leads (if sufficiently funded) from a research question or idea to a hypothesis or new method that can be tested and, ultimately, to the results of those tests which then have to be communicated. This communication step is crucial, as it adds to our global knowledge foundation (often described, following Newton, as "the shoulders of giants") for new research questions or ideas that may eventually lead to things like "innovation", "insight" and "progress". If innovators-to-be, however, do not have access to the findings of their forebears (which may indeed be contemporaries), they will have to spend a lot of their time and resources by (re)inventing some aspects of the giants' shoulders before starting to work on their innovations in the first place. Open Access is a movement to lift those access barriers, and it is not only useful to researchers but it can also, for instance, help patients and their relatives to gather first-hand expert information on their specific health conditions, and it can help to inform public debates about research data with scientific implications. The full power of Open Access, however, can only be harvested if all other steps  within the scientific cycle (including, e.g., notebook keeping) also become increasingly open, a goal with multiple names (of which Open Science is my favourite). This would not only reduce the considerable time lag between the obtainment of some results and their application in other circumstances but also foster the development of new citation metrics that would allow to more adequately evaluate the research accomplishments of young scientists.


2. How did you first become aware of it?

I had been aware of the barriers since I started reading scientific papers in the mid-1990s, as I rarely had access to much of the literature cited therein, no matter what library I went to (and I went to more than a dozen regularly at that time). I got a glimpse of a possible solution when checking out the freely available content at BioMed Central on a weekly basis some years later but this again did not cover much of my core areas of interest (Evolutionary Biophysics), nor did arxiv.org that I had discovered around the same time. So it took the Budapest Open Access Initiative to make me aware of the progress that had already been achieved or was underway by 2001, and I signed it shortly after starting to work on my PhD thesis.


3. Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?

Knowledge grows when shared. And what else is the goal of research if not growing knowledge on a global scale? Besides, I find it non-sustainable to use the limited resources that we have to constantly re-invent the wheel for reasons external to the research process.


4. What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

As an author, I strive to publish OA (i.e. gold) but independent of whether this is possible or not, I self-archive my papers (i.e. green OA). I am neither a journal editor nor part of a publishing house but I occasionally use my blog to cover OA and related topics, particularly Open Education, and Open Science as a whole, and I link to others who do this more intensively. Finally, I am playing around with platforms and technologies that may facilitate the transition to a more open scientific cycle, keeping a special eye on what these upcoming changes might mean to young scientists, e.g. in terms of theses and online lectures rather than papers. Others can, of course, familiarize themselves with the issue of effectively (in both time and resources) communicating (peer-reviewed) research results via the channels that are technically possible, they can experiment with the tools at hand to communicate their thoughts, and they can educate even more others about these matters in more traditional ways. In fact, I think they should.

The German network of PhD candidates and Postdocs, Thesis, publishes (in German) a quarterly journal, THESE, on doctoral and postdoctoral matters, mainly in Germany. For the autumn 2008 issue, I conducted an interview with philosopher Larry Sanger whose postdoctoral activities on the organization of knowledge in projects like Wikipedia, Citizendium and WatchKnow, will certainly be of interest to knowledge workers beyond Germany, and thus an advance online version of the interview is given here.

Why did you do your PhD, what does this have to do with your current activities, would you do it again?

I did my Ph.D. because I have wanted to earn a living as a philosopher since I was about 17 years old. Until I finished my M.A. I thought I would become a philosophy professor; then I became disillusioned with academia in a way that I imagine is pretty typical. I decided to finish my Ph.D. simply because I was so close to doing so, and just in case I changed my mind.

Having gone through the entire academic credentialing process has helped my career and current activities in many ways. It has acquainted me with the nature and justification of editorial and academic standards, and that has proven to be invaluable in leading reference work projects. I think having specialized in philosophy and in epistemology in particular, as well as in philosophy of law, also has helped me to articulate and defend the particular approach I have to collaborative knowledge production. Of course, the mere degree itself has opened doors and made me seem more credible to some of the people I've been trying to organize.

I would certainly do it again. But I might also have taken a few years off and gotten a B.A. or M.S. in Computer Science as well.

Why should PhD candidates and PhD holders contribute to Citizendium, as opposed to other online encyclopedic projects (Wikipedias, Knol, Encyclopedia of Earth, Scholarpedia, Larousse etc)?

There are many potential reasons why an academic might want to contribute to the Citizendium. I believe most do so because they find its unique mission compelling. What do I mean by that? It is the only project in existence with its configuration of qualities. On the one hand, it is a general, open content encyclopedia, fully collaborative, and open to public contribution. On the other hand, we make a general oversight role for experts, and we require real names. This unique combination of policies appeals to those who understand and appreciate the benefits and potential of Wikipedia, but who also understand the drawbacks of Wikipedia's particular system.

In short, the Citizendium may be, currently, the world's best hope for summing up knowledge both freely and credibly in one place. Other projects, such as Knol, Encyclopedia of Earth, and so forth, all have their good points, but they also all have a variety of drawbacks. Perhaps the largest drawback of the other academic-led projects is that very few of them are robustly collaborative. While I can't take the time here to explain my arguments for this, I think that collaboratively produced encyclopedia articles can be far superior to what is produced by individuals. So, while time will tell, I think the Citizendium holds the greatest promise; insofar as others agree with me, they naturally want to be part of something that is so world-changing and so important to spreading knowledge of their fields.

What about non-English sections? And would Citizendium be affected by the recently revised peer review policy at the German Wikipedia?

I'm not able to speak to the revised peer review policy at the German Wikipedia. My understanding is that they are not really engaging in peer review, but making sure that there is not abuse in revisions made by the newest contributors. Simply checking that edits are not vandalism addresses a different problem. It is obviously very far from anything like robust expert involvement or credible peer review.

We do hope to expand into other languages, including German, but it is more than a big enough challenge to get the English Citizendium off the ground very well at this time. The real difficulty will be to find people who will lead the new projects, in other languages, on a full-time basis. We might end up simply announcing a sort of rough franchise of the idea of the Citizendium.

What are the long-term perspectives of integrating encyclopedic projects (which generally operate a "no original research" policy) with scholarly wikis, e.g. of the OpenWetWare type?

I have given that quite a bit of thought, and for a long time I thought that it would be both possible and desirable to pool forces, somehow. Having tried to start the Citizendium as a fork of Wikipedia, however, has given me insight into the special difficulties of incompatible editorial policies and very different communities, or editorial processes. The most profound discovery I think I have made is that content deeply encodes editorial policy, and for that reason it is extremely difficult if not impossible to merge projects that have very different or incompatible editorial policies. But even small differences in editorial policies can have huge effects. So my hopes are not high for usefully combining content projects online, generally. One has only to look at answers.com and other search and reference aggregators, and one gets a sense of what the problem is.

We are, of course, open to people porting content from dormant content projects, but, as you can well imagine, we are not really interested in changing our own editorial policies to make a wholesale merger happen. So any proposal we (or others) might make about a content merger would simply be an invitation to close down their shop and adapt their content to our system. Few if any people will be able to take such an invitation seriously, at least not until we are more credible.

What seems more possible is that content sources might populate Citizendium subpages--pages where you can find different kinds of reference information about a topic.

Citizendium has also launched an educational initiative, Eduzendium. Considering that young researchers near the completion of their PhD are often involved, in overlapping or adjacent periods, with both the student and the teaching side of coursework, is there something special that they might gain from or offer to this project?

Eduzendium has already been successfully demonstrated to be a very innovative, interesting assignment for university students. The task of crafting an excellent, broad introduction to a topic might be easy and boring to the instructor, but to students--especially advanced students—it presents exactly the sort of challenge from which they can learn most. In addition, students whose work is displayed publicly tend to do their best; and they are also sometimes helped by Citizendium authors and editors. You might have heard of instructors assigning work on Wikipedia for college credit. Eduzendium is similar, but we have many, many more topics that are completely open; and our community is far better behaved. In some ways it is a superb venue for public, collaborative writing by advanced students.

Intructors use Eduzendium in a few different ways. For example, you can assign students specific topics, or you can assign groups (or the whole class) work on a topic. It is quite adaptable and I would strongly encourage your readers to give it a try! You will benefit, and by giving free content to the whole world, many others will benefit along with you.

A good occasion for that would be our Write-a-thons on the first Wednesday of each month or the Workgroup Weeks, starting with Biology Week from September 22-28.

Everybody is invited to submit educational videos to WatchKnow, an educational online platform due to be launched September 20 (preview here) which strives to collect videos, lectures and animations suitable for kindergartens, primary and secondary education, much like WAYS partner wlp, the world lecture project does it for university-level education. Materials correctly submitted to WatchKnow until September 26 will be eligible for a prize draw.

It does not matter whether you created the video yourself or just found it on the web, but you should be able to provide the data relevant for copyright, and give an explanation why that video is particularly suited for educating children or teenagers. Watchknow is headed by Larry Sanger who also founded Citizendium, an educational Wikipedia offspring directed at university students, researchers and adult education.

(by Daniel Mietchen and Supten Sarbadhikari)

Introduction
Scientific research is the systematic dwelling at the frontiers of knowledge. Since these are scattered in space and time, successful dwellers require reliable reference works that assemble existing knowledge. Diderot and d'Alembert created their "Encyclopédie" to serve this purpose [1], and over the two and a half centuries since, many other encyclopedias have been produced following their scheme: Written by scholars, they charged users for access to the information they provided at update intervals on the scale of years. This resulted in credibility, the core currency of reference works, but (by today's standards) in limited dissemination and slow reactions to new knowledge. Web-based wikis, spearheaded by the Wikipedias, have extended knowledge accumulation to fields far beyond any traditional notions of expertise, provide their information at no cost to the user, and invite anybody to contribute (even anonymously) on a voluntary basis. This makes them popular and updateable on scales way below years but vulnerable to vandalism, thereby precluding credibility. Due to such problems, wikis had a slow start into the academic world but expert-only wikis like Scholarpedia [2] or the Encyclopedia of Earth [3] are gaining ground, and with the continued growth, diversification and global availability of the Internet, knowledge and the structuring thereof are becoming ever more dynamic and participatory [4]. Some key biology databases and communities are going wiki [5][6][7][8][9], as did OpenWetWare [10] - a place where lab notebooks are being kept in public. Besides, collaborative learning by structuring knowledge is a good preparation for later collaborative knowledge production in research teams. Collaborative, peer-to-peer learning principles thus develop in parallel and lead to more student-centred learning environments [11].

Citizendium (CZ)
Citizendium [12][13] is a web-based educational and reference platform that seeks to combine expert knowledge with public participation in a way that harvests the strengths of both worlds and avoids the major pitfalls of unilateral approaches. It allows anybody to contribute under their real names, provides all of its contents for free, and hosts two basic flavours of articles: As in Wikipedia [14], most content pages can be edited by any user but the information they contain will not be considered reliable. Credibility is lent to an article in a very traditional way, i.e. by means of approval by experts ("editors") upon fulfillment of a set of quality criteria like factual accuracy, balanced arguments, and readability by non-specialists. The approved articles then serve as a reliable introduction to a topic (much like in paper encyclopedias, just more up-to-date), and all the non-approved versions ("drafts") as an educational playground, with stubs actually being encouraged in the hope that they attract other contributors that improve them. Approved versions cannot be edited but work on an approved article can continue in the draft version which may eventually enter the approval process again.

This two-step (and potentially cyclic) approach is conceptually similar to Feynman’s thermal ratchet [15], the principle behind molecular motors [16][17]: Whereas Brownian motion can drive the paddle wheel randomly, the ratchet's movement will only follow if the pawl permits. If random motion can be translated into directed motion by means of appropriately structured molecular motors, the notion that reference works for human knowledge can be structured in a way that takes into account contributions by experts and the educated public may indeed be perceived as straightforward: given the incentive of presenting one's knowledge on a platform that regularly attracts putative employers or academic supervisors, the input provided by most registered users can be expected to average well above thermal noise, thereby facilitating the role of the pawl.

At CZ, the pawl's role (which requires energy) is being played by said editors - people whose life's work is to know things and who are willing to share the knowledge they have acquired during long years of dedication to their field. Consequently, CZ contributors are given credence for their work: The wiki allows to track individual contributions in a much more detailed way than any non-wiki system currently used in scholarly communication. This transparency of contributions to the structuring and expansion of global knowledge may well provide a fertile ground for the careers of knowledge workers and workers-to-be.

Education at CZ
Taking these educational considerations into practice, Citizendium, in collaboration with teachers and lecturers, has launched Eduzendium [18], a project that allows students to write their course assignments online on the Citizendium. Students work for course credits, and their teachers grade the finished work based on the quality of the article drafts produced from each student's input. But by writing their assignments under this scheme, students not only get to earn grade credits, they can see their work online and add to the global store of knowledge. By collaborating with the rapidly growing Citizendium community of expert and non-expert authors, they stand good chances that their essays eventually develop into a lasting encyclopedic article. Finally, perhaps best of all, students get to learn in a highly collaborative real-time way, and rumours have it that they might actually have fun doing so. Not surprisingly, educators who opted for Eduzendium noticed a higher degree of enthusiasm amongst their students. The educational potential of CZ is enhanced by the use of subpages which provide for an easy integration with other free educational materials like videos, e.g. the non-profit, K-12 educational video contest WatchKnow [19] or, at undergraduate level, the non-profit world lecture project (wlp)° [20].

Scholarly knowledge at CZ
CZ covers many fields, both academic and beyond, which are organized in workgroups whose main responsibility is to identifiy a set of core articles around which the field’s knowledge is structured, and to oversee the approval process (editorship in the sense discussed above is defined in terms of these workgroups).

As in traditional encyclopedias and Wikipedia, original research will not be allowed in the main namespace of CZ. Discussions are afloat for including original research into the subpages (e.g. as „signed articles“, similar to contributions to Scholarpedia) or other namespaces. Ways to take academic credit for contributions to CZ are also being discussed [21], whereas bot assistance for fact picking (as in [7]) can be made available on a case-by-case basis to facilitate data-intensive contributions.

Cross-disciplinary links are achieved in a variety of ways: First, several workgroups can collaborate on individual articles. Second, each article features a „related articles“ subpage where parent topics, subtopics and related topics are linked independent of their respective workgroups. Third, a coherent disambiguation strategy avoids page name disputes for articles on topics associated with different meanings in different fields, while allowing for a synopsis of what the different uses may have in common. Fourth, Citizendium organizes monthly Write-a-thons on broad topics to which anybody can contribute. Fifth, every user can nominate drafts as „Article of the Week“ or „New Draft of the Week“, and the winning entries are featured on the Welcome page, from where they usually receive lots of edits from specialists and non-specialists alike. Finally, as is typical for wikis, all contributions are immediately visible by anyone, and so the potential of frequent visits to the „recent changes“ page to initiate cross-disciplinary interactions should not be underestimated.

Activities in the biomedical fields have been especially visible: Biology is second to history in terms of number of articles (followed by health sciences), second to computers in terms of number of authors (followed by history) and fourth (after computers, engineering and health sciences) in number of editors (for details, see the CZ statistics [22].

"Biology" was the first article to be approved in Citizendium (on December 15, 2006, half a year after the launch of the project) [23]. The article Biology makes good use of subpages for related articles, bibliography, external links, gallery, videos and signed articles. This article's history also highlights how experts and non-experts work shoulder on shoulder, and that may be inspirational for others to join the bandwagon. A good opportunity for that will be "Biology Week" [24]- the first of a whole series of topic-dedicated weeks that will initially be held once a month (watch out for Health Sciences Week, Food Science Week, Agriculture Week and Anthropology Week).

How you can get involved
"Biology Week" is scheduled to be held during September 22 to September 28, 2008. For all biologists, this is a chance to start sharing their expertise by creating and improving biology articles, or to satisfy their curiosity by browsing (and contributing to) articles on other subjects. Others can lend their phrasing or illustration skills to make articles more attractive to non-specialist readers. Students, as explained above, can even get credits for that, and all the interested public can participate - it is an open wiki, after all.

References
1. Diderot, D.; D'Alembert, J. (1751). Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia or systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts). Paris: Briasson, David, Le Breton, Durand. Online at http://artfl.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic31/getobject.pl?c.36....
2. Main Page – Scholarpedia, http://www.scholarpedia.org/ . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
3. Main Page - Encyclopedia of Earth, http://www.eoearth.org/ . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
4. Butler, D. (2005). "Science in the web age: joint efforts". Nature 438 (7068): 548-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/438548a.
5. Giles, J. (2007). "Key biology databases go wiki". Nature 445 (7129): 691. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/445691a.
6. Mons, B.; Ashburner, M.; Chichester, C.; Van Mulligen, E.; Weeber, M.; Den Dunnen, J.; Van Ommen, G.J.; Musen, M.; Cockerill, M.; Hermjakob, H.; Others, (2008). "Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins". Genome Biology 9 (5): R89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/gb-2008-9-5-r89.
7. Huss III, J.W.; Orozco, C.; Goodale, J.; Wu, C.; Batalov, S.; Vickers, T.J.; Valafar, F.; Su, A.I. (2008). "A Gene Wiki for Community Annotation of Gene Function". PLoS Biology 6 (7): e175. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060175.
8. Pico, A.R.; Kelder, T.; Iersel, M.; Hanspers, K.; Conklin, B.; Evelo, C. (2008). "WikiPathways: Pathway Editing for the People". PLoS Biology 6 (7): e184. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060184.
9. Biology-Online Dictionary, http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Main_Page . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
10. Main Page – OpenWetWare, http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
11. Boulos, M.N.; Maramba, I.; Wheeler, S. (2006). "Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education". BMC Medical Education 6 (41): 1472-6920. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6920-6-41.
12. Welcome to Citizendium - encyclopedia article – Citizendium, http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
13. Giles, J. (2006). "Wikipedia rival calls in the experts". Nature 443 (7111): 493. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/443493a.
14. Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedi... . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
15. Feynman, R.P.; Leighton, R.B.; Sands, M. (1963). The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 1. Addison Wesley, Reading MA.
16. Oster, G. (2002). "Brownian ratchets: Darwin's motors". Nature 417 (6884): 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/417025a.
17. Ait-Haddou, R.; Herzog, W. (2003). "Brownian ratchet models of molecular motors". Cell Biochemistry and Biophysics 38 (2): 191-213. http://dx.doi.org/10.1385/CBB:38:2:191.
18. Eduzendium - the collaborative learning environment, http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Eduzendium . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
19. WatchKnow, http://www.watchknow.org/ . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
20. World Lecture Project, http://www.world-lecture-project.org/ . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
21. How to cite Citizendium articles, http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Proposals/Citing_CZ_article_by... . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
22. Citizendium – Statistics, http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Statistics . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
23. Biology - encyclopedia article – Citizendium, http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.
24. Biology Week - encyclopedia article – Citizendium, http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology_Week . Retrieved on July 17, 2008.

Acknowledgements:
We thank Chris Day, Larry Sanger and Anthony Sebastian for comments on earlier drafts of this blog.

I am wondering how far we can get with "Open X" movements in science and research, and I will combine my musings about this with a recommendation to attend a satellite event at the Euroscience Open Forum 2008 in Barcelona.

First, let's consider how far we have come in terms of opening up the research process:
* Open Access in the narrow sense, i.e. to published or at least peer-accepted research results, is real for a substantial share of research output and rapidly gaining ground (for most recent updates, click here).
* Open Access to the scholarly review process is gaining ground (public or interactive peer review, e.g. here).
* Open Access to empirical data (Open Data) is moving forward, too.
* Open Access to software (Open Source) is driving many aspects of society, including wikis and many research projects.
* Open Access to encyclopedic knowledge is becoming real on the heels of Wikipedia and Citizendium.
* Open Access to lab notebooks is being experimented with at OpenWetWare.

To sum up, there are not too many aspects of research that currently remain entirely in the dark. They basically boil down to grant writing (an attempt is here) as well as the associated review and grant allocation procedures, bookkeeping (which is partly open in much of Scandinavia, within the wider framework of Open Government), the actual research and data analysis, and to writing up the results for publication.

I do not see any technical issues prohibiting complete openness of the whole research cycle, and so I deem it a valid
target to aim at, already at the current stage of technology. However, people more involved with the practical implementation of these things may have more complex views on these matters, and so I am glad to see that such topics found their way into the program of ESOF 2008, in the form of a satellite event entitled Collaborating for the future of open science where experts will discuss them.

The role of expert knowledge is central to a video documentary on Wikipedia's way of knowledge sharing. It features the opinions of the co-founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, as well as of some other major Web 2.0 players and critics, including the authors Tim O’Reilly and Andrew Keen as well as Charles Leadbeater (a former advisor to Tony Blair), Bob McHenry (former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica) and Ndesanjo Macha, one of the first to blog in an African language and one of the major contributors to the Swahili Wikipedia (which, by the way, is about to reach the 7,000 article milestone within the next few days).

The views of these people, particularly on truth and its representation in encyclopedias, contrast quite significantly but their aggregation provides food for thought on how the future of knowledge sharing might look like. The explicitly scientific perspective was mainly missing but between the lines, it became clear that large interactively collaborative (ubuntu) projects like this might also play an increasingly important role in academic research and tertiary education.

One possible direction is a continuation and expansion of Wikipedia until saturation, other options include branching and the development of more academically inclined variants like Scholarpedia, the Encyclopedias of Earth and Cosmos as well as Citizendium (not mentioned in the documentary but in a previous post here), and there are certainly many other possible developments.

Homework is a word that probably very few associate with something positive, and here, I will summarize four recent (independent but converging) twists on the topic:
(1) a study by researchers at the Technical University of Dresden (see press release, German only: http://idw-online.de/pages/de/news245011 ) has demonstrated that homework assignments do indeed fail, in most cases, to help the student in learning;

(2) Citizendium, a wiki-type free encyclopedia aimed at improving general credibility and article quality with respect to Wikipedia, has launched an initiative which encourages university instructors to assign Citizendium articles as homework for which students can get credits (see press release at
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Citizendium_Press_Releases/Jan... );

(3) OpenStudents.org, upon whose inauguration I have commented previously (http://www.ways.org/en/2008/jan/31/1915/daniel/open_students_pla...), now features an article on a very similar approach - to let students deposit their homework in freely accessible repositories, and to give them the option to comment on such contents (cf. http://www.openstudents.org/2008/02/13/student-publishing-as-an-... );

(4) As previously announced, a global initiative on Open education is gaining momentum (cf. http://www.ways.org/en/2008/jan/25/0618/daniel/cape_town_open_ed... ), and (2) and (3) are important steps in this direction.