Hired editor? - WikiJournal-en

23 May 2018

Hi all WikiJournal participants,

Because of an increased burden in the stage of finding and inviting peer
reviewers for submissions, we've been discussing at WikiJMed about
including funds in our next grant application to Wikimedia for hiring a
paid editor to help out in this task. It would be unfair to have it for
only WikiJMed so I take it up with all of us, also since WikiJSci currently
lacks a willing peer review coordinators
<https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Science/Associate_editors#Coordinator>
for
the 2 most recent submissions
<https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Science/Potential_upcoming_articles>.
A paid editor could look up potential peer reviewers and either invite them
directly, or prepare an email list with links to their credentials to board
members.

A paid editor would be able to help in many tedious tasks, including to
(citing Thomas' entry at WikiJMed):

   - send followup emails at certain dates
   - track submissions
   - copyediting (for a wikijournal this could be things like image
   formatting, finding who images should be attributed to, checking ref
   formatting)
   - formatting the final pdf upon acceptance
   - managing the doi submission to crossref upon acceptance
   - If having bot-experience, program bots for technical tasks such as to
   keep the {{article_info}} template synchronised between main page and
   subpage and add accepted articles to the relevant issue page

These tasks would not involve direct knowledge of the subject material. The
idea would be to have them handle those elements to free up time for the
medical/academic editors to focus on specialist tasks.

What do you think for WikiJSci and WikiJHum?

Best regards,

Mikael