Thursday, March 29, 2012

Indexing Wikipedia Article Submissions On Pubmed

I have complained before about few academics writing Wikipedia pages and instead writing reviews that few people will read. So, I feel compelled to admit that this is really cool:
We suggest a principal reason for this limited breadth and depth of coverage of topics in computational biology is one that affects a number of disciplines: reward. Authors in the biomedical sciences get academic reward for publishing papers in reputable journals that are indexed in PubMed and have associated digital object identifiers (DOIs).... 
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...
I continue to be impressed by the innovation from the PLoS suite.