PLoS Computational Biology goes wiki

“Today saw an important step forward towards a wikification of scholarly workflows:PLoS Computational Biology published an article that did not only follow the journal’s own author guidelines but also those for writing articles on the English Wikipedia, where a copy of the journal article has been pasted into [[Circular Permutation in Proteins]], where it shall live on in the hands of the wiki community. The article is the first in a new manuscript track – Topic pages – that adds a dynamic component to articles published in the journal, as explained in the accompanying editorial: ‘This month, we have published our first Topic Page on ‘Circular Permutations in Proteins’ by Spencer Bliven and Andreas Prlić [6] as part of our Education section. Topic Pages are the version of record of a page to be posted to (the English version of) Wikipedia. In other words, PLoS Computational Biology publishes a version that is static, includes author attributions, and is indexed in PubMed. In addition, we intend to make the reviews and reviewer identities of Topic Pages available to our readership. Our hope is that the Wikipedia pages subsequently become living documents that will be updated and enhanced by the Wikipedia community, assuming they are in keeping with Wikipedia’s guidelines and policies, either by individuals, or, perhaps as is already happening in medicine and molecular and cell biology, by something more organized, or with a more formal review structure. We also hope this will lead to improved scholarship in a changing medium of learning, in this case made possible by the Creative Commons Attribution License that we use.’ The editorial also discusses the issue of reward for scholars to contribute to endeavours like Wikipedia, for which Topic Pages provide a novel mechanism. Like the quoted section, the paper contains direct links to Wikipedia pages for background, which dramatically reduces the need to rehash what is already known, while still allowing for a minimum of context. The reviews that have been produced as a result of the journal’s peer review process have since been posted to the talk page of the Wikipedia entry, along with some further procedural explanations. Through this manuscript track, PLoS Computational Biology joins the so far very small circle of journals that have experimented with dynamic features...”