Interlinking journal and wiki publications through joint citation: Working examples from ZooKeys and Plazi on Species-ID.

Scholarly publishing and citation practices have developed largely in the absence of versioned documents. The digital age requires new practices to combine the old and the new. We describe how the original published source and a versioned wiki page based on it can be reconciled and combined into a single citation reference. We illustrate the citation mechanism by way of practical examples focusing on journal and wiki publishing of taxon treatments. Specifically, we discuss mechanisms for permanent cross-linking between the static original publication and the dynamic, versioned wiki, as well as for automated export of journal content to the wiki, to reduce the workload on authors, for combining the journal and the wiki citation and for integrating it with the attribution of wiki contributors.

Introduction

The static character of academic publications inherited from the era of paper publishing is obviously at odds with the dynamic and interminable process of taxonomic research (Erwin and Johnson 2000, Penev et al. 2009). The Internet has enabled online publishing methods that provide straightforward ways to change published content over time. On the other side, time-stamped, non-modifiable, persistent scientific publications are one of the fundamentals of scholarly communication and publishing practices. They are important for several reasons, most importantly for a permanent publication record, citability and compliance with the biological Codes, e.g., The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN) and The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). They also provide a stable publication record for any other purpose, e.g., registration of priority and academic credit, scientific trust, assessment of priority for ideas as well as for taxon descriptions, management of publication records and bibliographic indexing. Many online publication systems guarantee neither persistence nor a public traceability of version changes over time.

The idea of a combination between journal-published taxon descriptions and Internet-based updates was first proposed by Erwin and Johnson (2000) at a time when wikis were niche applications known only to few. The wiki approach was rendered popular by Wikipedia; the MediaWiki software it runs on is an environment in which users can create and edit public content. Importantly, wiki software like MediaWiki keeps a publicly accessible, time-stamped history of all changes over time, which renders it interesting from the perspective of scholarly peer review (Black 2008). Nevertheless, the worlds of scholarly publishing and wikis still exhibit little overlap, despite numerous scholars contributing to both (Page 2010) and even non-academic wikis, such as Wikipedia and Citizendium, that actively invite expert contributions (The Guardian 2011, Morris and Mietchen 2010).

In an attempt to reconcile the static character of taxon descriptions and the need to continuously update them, ZooKeys published recently the pilot article of Hendriks and Balke (2011), where the journal description of the new beetle species Neobidessodes darwiniensis was exported manually to a wiki taxon page on species-id.net on the day of publication (http://species-id.net/wiki/Neobidessodes_darwiniensis). The original journal description contains the link to the wiki page of the species, while the wiki page points to the journal publication as original source of information. Both sides will profit from such a workflow: the wiki version of the description can be further edited and expanded with new information, providing an opportunity for a potentially eternal process of improvement and data enrichment; at the same time, the journal publication validates taxa (re-)descriptions and provides a permanent publication record. The presence of the originally published source on the wiki page derived from it and the explicit requirement to cite both, will increase citation rates of taxonomic publications (see, e.g., Nielsen 2008). Low citation rates have been recognized as one of the main impediments to contemporary taxonomy (Werner 2006, Agnarsson and Kuntner 2007).PageBreak

The current paper describes an improved method to (1) combine the citation of the original taxon treatment published in a journal with the versioned wiki page of it into a single bibliographic reference; (2) list the names of the contributors to the particular versioned wiki page in the same reference alongside with the date and version number; (3) automatically export taxon treatments and create wiki pages of them simultaneously with the journal publication; (4) provide a permanent cross-linking between the original publication and the respective versioned wiki pages.

The method is demonstrated by way of sample papers (Stoev and Enghoff 2011, Bantaowong et al. 2011) published in this issue. The papers serve as an example of journal publication of taxon treatments (of both newly described and redescribed taxa) that are automatically exported to wiki (species-id.net) on the day of publication. Treatments from any paper published as TaxPub XML file can easily be uploaded, too, and we illustrate that with two PhytoKeys articles published in 2010 (Kress et al. 2010, Knapp 2010). Further, we illustrate how taxon treatments from legacy literature can be exported from Plazi’s treatment repository to Species-ID. A list of the Species-ID taxon pages generated in the frame of the present project is given in Appendix 1.

Citation of versioned documents

Currently, wiki pages like other Internet resources are usually cited as URLs, often adding a “date of accession”. Clearly, the latter has little practical meaning if the cited Internet resource does not provide a public version history. On most wiki platforms, however, each separate edit of a wiki page is versioned and time-stamped in a publicly accessible manner. This feature, along with the ease with which edits can be made, is a major factor contributing to the phenomenal success of Wikipedia and the high popularity of wiki environments in general.

Any versioned online source, however, has the problem that two or more possible citations (and corresponding URLs) might exist, that is, the one for the most recent version and the one or more for previous versions in time. For many use cases, it is desirable to link to the most recent, presumably improved or error-corrected URL, and thus this URL is normally used when referring to an article. At arXiv and Nature Precedings, for instance, the generic identifier always points to the latest version (cf. http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3216 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2009.3267), even though individual versions can technically be cited as easily (cf. http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3216v2 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2009.3267.4). Both sites explain the versioning in places where few citing authors will look, which makes it difficult to establish a consistent citation pattern for different versions of the same article. Similarly, the “permanent link” available for any version of any page in a standard wiki environment (cf. Fig. 1) is not known to all users who cite wiki articles. Furthermore, attribution to the contributors to a versioned wiki page provides another barrier to a proper citation, because it requires significant wiki experience and substantial work to extract the names of the contributors from a highly edited page.

Figure 1.

Citation template for the simultaneous journal and wiki publication of Sinocallipus catba Stoev & Enghoff, 2011 (generic link: http://species-id.net/wiki/Sinocallipus_catba, permanent link of the version depicted in the figure: http://species-id.net/w/index.php?title=Sinocallipus_catba&oldid=XXXX). The generic link always points to the most recent version of the page, while a permanent link is specific to one particular revision.

PageBreakLack of appropriate mechanisms for recognition of wiki authorship is one of the major reasons for many academics to stay away from the wiki world (cf. George 2007, Prug 2010). Clear attribution of wiki authorship is an important prerequisite for receiving credit. Thus, wiki pages intended to be cited in a scholarly manner would certainly benefit from an on-page display of a recommended citation format. In cases where the entire content has been created in an on-wiki collaboration, this is just a technical problem, for which several solutions exist (e.g., Suh et al. 2008). However, in the example of a close journal-to-wiki workflow, the first version of a page is near-identically derived from a source outside the wiki. The challenge is how to properly cite both the first, original version and the later on-wiki contributions in a single and consistent way.

Thus far, wiki elements in scholarly publishing are rare (for an overview, see Mietchen et al. 2011). In the life sciences, the two most prominent examples are RNA Biology and Scholarpedia. RNA Biology requires authors to submit the draft for a Wikipedia article along with certain types of manuscript submissions. The Wikipedia draft article is included in the peer review process and its generic wiki address (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmY, meanwhile changed to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmY_RNA) mentioned in the journal article (i.e. Jones et al. 2009), which in turn is then cited from the Wikipedia article once the journal article has been published. This way, the journal and wiki versions are interlinked yet cited independently. Scholarpedia is a review journal implemented entirely on MediaWiki. For all its accepted articles (e.g., Dawson and Lauterbur 2008), it always clearly displays the generic wiki address (i.e., http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Magnetic_resonance_imaging), the DOI and the wiki revision number (the current one is #73087), states a recommended citation at the bottom of the page – Joan Dawson, Paul C. Lauterbur (2008) Magnetic resonance imaging. Scholarpedia, 3(7): 3381, (go to the first approved version) – and provides a prominent link on the top right to an auxiliary page containing the citation in standard bibliographic formats.

To the best of our knowledge, however, there is no established citation format that combines both an original non-wiki source and the respective wiki page within one and the same citation reference. In our understanding, such a mechanism should credit both the authors of the original publication and the contributors to the respective version of the wiki page. In addition, the reader will always be referred to a defined, numbered and time-stamped version of the wiki page that also links directly to the original published source of the wiki content.

We propose to cite wiki pages based on original scholarly publications according to the following scheme:

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