Synopsis

From Open Source Publishing 2.0

This proposal will detail a new open-access, interactive, and dynamic system for publishing engineering (and scientific) research. Everything will be done online with open source software. The web-based software with which users will interact is MediaWiki which powers the rapidly growing Wikipedia 'open-source' encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.org). The system will allow authors to submit papers, reviewers to immediately comment on them, and authors to immediately make revisions in a very dynamic way. The ultimate goal is to not only have open access to the papers but also make the reviewing process open (i.e. not anonymous) and the papers open source so that anyone can make revisions. This has been a vision of the PI for many years and may seem strange to anyone unfamiliar with Wikipedia. While convincing authors to make their work open source and reviewers to reveal their identity maybe be difficult, the PI has a plan to slowly convert people to this model starting from what they are now familiar. Moving away from anonymous reviewing will hopefully make reviewing a more visible part of our efforts. The 'good citizen' incentive for reviewing is no longer working, and until reviewing becomes just as important as publishing authors will continue to flood the system with papers but not do their part in reviewing a proportional number of papers. Thus, this virtual organization aims to improve access to results, decrease the time it takes to get ideas out, and enhance the overall submission and review process. The technology and the PIs newly developed skills in developing web-based applications are now finally in place to make this a reality.