ConwayLife.com

So, two years ago, I posted a thread here about forming a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to cellular automata. I made little to no progress Mainly due to the little interest I received when I first posted the thread. Since then, though, I've actually published a paper (albeit not peer-reviewed) on cellular automata through an accepted journal, and I want to return to my old idea.

There's a group over at Wikimedia (although officially hosted at Wikiversity, I don't know why) that is exploring a totally new form of academic publishing -- one that's totally open-sourced and based on MediaWiki. Everything is public, editable, and based on wiki markup.That reminded me of an idea I once had...

My idea is pretty much this: There could be a journal, formally part of the WikiJournal group, that would be 100% intergrated with LifeWiki and referenceable as an academic publication -- an open, free, and publicly accessible one. It'd be relatively low-maintenance and might attract a fair bit of attention. Also citizen science and yadda yadda yadda.

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tracefleeman wrote:My idea is pretty much this: There could be a journal, formally part of the WikiJournal group, that would be 100% intergrated with LifeWiki and referenceable as an academic publication -- an open, free, and publicly accessible one. It'd be relatively low-maintenance and might attract a fair bit of attention. Also citizen science and yadda yadda yadda.

My six cents' worth:

1) I think it's a fine idea, at least in theory.

2) In practice it would be good to locate a sizable group of potential contributors to get things going -- produce a baseline number of journal articles, so that it's obvious what kind of material is suitable for the journal going forward.

3) I'm not sure that the conwaylife.com forums is a very likely recruiting ground for people wanting to publish journal articles. We certainly have our share of lurking academics, but for the most part there isn't a shortage of places out there where CA articles and white papers can be published.

4) For example, I've been thinking for several years about writing an article for Wolfram's "Complex Systems" journal, about Conway's Life self-replication technology. It keeps going out of date before I can get it properly started -- and writing it would take weeks and months of my spare time away from the actual research, which is what I really find interesting anyway.

5) That's the problem with recreational math: it's supposed to be recreational! Writing journal-quality articles, at least absent a publish-or-perish reason to do so, doesn't always seem like a lot of fun.

6) "Relatively low-maintenance" rings some kind of big alarm bells. Who would be doing the maintenance? And what incentive would keep them doing it, when the work inevitably expands to over-fill the time available?

One reason I think using the WikiJournal template is the fact that it is without the academic "baggage" associated with the larger, more "professional" journals. Since it's all built off of wiki software, the same people who contribute to this wiki (LifeWiki, of course,) will be able to publish their original research without the problems associated with formatting or typesetting or even the sort of academic jargon that usually is associated with the publishing process -- all while retaining the integrity of our research.

As for research (since you say that writing journal-quality articles could take away from the research,) I think that the journal itself would actually further CA research, academic and recreational, and it'd circulate findings a lot farther. I'd go as far as to say, since both WikiJournal publications and LifeWiki are based on MediaWiki, it'd be possible to "translate" many of the articles on LifeWiki (at least those that concern original research) for publication, and those articles would then be referenceable not just in other academic avenues but also on more mainstream venues like Wikipedia. So it'd be a sort of crossroads for CA research -- which, of course, is what most journals aim to be

As for "low maintenance," I meant that the actual format of the journal would be very streamlined. Since it's based on wiki software it's straightforward, community-based, and essentially free -- so it really is low-maintenance.

If anyone is wondering how it would look, I've created a little demo here. I've taken random pages off the wiki for paper examples but of course, future papers would be formatted differently.