Thomas, colleagues,
the draft statement seems very much along the right lines.
One thing that stands out as needing attention is the statement "Authors
are recommended to avoid excessive and inappropriate self-citation." This
is vague. If it's only a recommendation then authors are permitted to
ignore it. The central terms "excessive" and "inappropriate" are
currently
undefined. Perhaps "excessive" could be defined explicitly as applying to
more than x% of the text; another definition could be more than y% of the
citations. If the meaning of "inappropriate" is different from
"excessive", I'd take it to imply "for publicity" or more
generally for
any purposes (such as promoting a product or service) other than
Wikiversity's.
All this would give us a draft wording along the lines of
* "Authors must avoid self-citation for publicity or any purposes other
than Wikiversity's.
* Self-citations should not apply to more than [x]% of the text.
* Further, self-citations should not form more than [y]% of the list of
citations."
I don't think we can sensibly use "must" in the second and third sentences
but they may help co-ordinators to rein in some excesses. An extreme case
is where an author has written a monograph about a rare marine worm, and
there's almost nobody else to cite. The placeholders x and y are
(therefore) not easy to specify but 30% might be a practical
starting-point for most topics.
I have very slightly copy-edited one sentence to read "Authors should read
sources before citing them, and their statements should accurately
represent the cited sources."
Ian Alexander
Hello all,
The WikiJournals should soon be implementing a statement of ethics
<https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement>,
covering issues such as:
- plagiarism
- misconduct
- reviewer confidentiality
- harassment
Many of these issues are common to all journals. In addition, a few are
unique to the Wikipedia-integration features of WikiJournals: large group
authorship
<https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement#Wiki_Authorship>,
attribution of content from Wikipedia
<https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement#Wiki_Attribution>,
and the definition of a preprint server
<https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement#Wiki_Preprint_definition>
.
It would be good to have as many eyes cast over it as possible to check
that we are happy to stand by it. We can also update and amend it over
time as needed.
Ethics statement draft:
Wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement
<https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement>
Discussion held here:
Wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal_User_Group#Ethics_statement_updates
<https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal_User_Group#Ethics_statement_updates>
All the best,
Thomas