The world's first wiki where authorship really matters (Nature Genetics, 2008). Due credit and reputation for authors. Imagine a global collaborative knowledge base for original thoughts. Search thousands of articles and collaborate with scientists around the globe.

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Hoffmann, R. A wiki for the life sciences where authorship matters. Nature Genetics (2008)
 

WikiGenes – Collaborative Publishing

WikiGenes is a non-profit initiative to provide a global collaborative knowledge base for the life sciences, where authorship matters.

Motivation

Over the past decades, a hypercycle of technological advancement, scientific hypothesis and increasing amount of data has led to a shift in perspective toward system thinking. The way scientific insights are published and communicated, however, has remained essentially the same since the days of Charles Darwin.

As a result, facts and insights about specific genes, their products and disease contexts are dispersed over millions of articles and journals. Current top-down approaches to curate this wealth of information do not scale with these developments.

Community approach

To save the collective published knowledge from laying idle in unstructured archives, the originators of knowledge, scientists and researchers, should be enabled to take part in organizing and integrating their novel insights in a common body of semantically rich knowledge, which can be searched efficiently and be integrated with experimental data.

This is the goal of WikiGenes. And with the interactive Web this bottom-up strategy has become feasible. WikiGenes is the first wiki system to combine the collaborative and largely altruistic possibilities of wikis with explicit authorship. Read more.

Authorship tracking

WikiGenes uses a powerful authorship tracking technology to link every contribution unambiguously to its author, creating the first hybrid of traditional, scientific and collaborative, dynamic publishing. Authorship is essential to appraise origin, authority and reliability of information. This is especially important in the wiki model, with its dynamic content and large number of authors. Moreover it is only fair to duly acknowledge authors, who invest time and knowledge in their contributions.

Help the cause

If you like WikiGenes, please tell your friends about it. We do not have the budget of big publishers, so we depend fully on word-of-mouth publicity.

You could also help us by linking to WikiGenes from your website. Thank you!

4 good reasons for working together

  • Including your findings in WikiGenes will increase the visibility and impact of your work.
  • Your contributions will help to create a knowledge base that covers all views and is always up-to-date.
  • Everyone in the information overloaded post genomic era depends on the knowledge and expertise of others.
  • WikiGenes is a non-profit and open access project for the scientific community.

Get started

Watch the introductory movie or read the in-depth tutorial on how to use WikiGenes. Or go ahead and create your free author account right now.

Content

If you are familiar with a topic in WikiGenes, you can contribute to this open access knowledge base by deleting incorrect information, restructuring or completely rewriting any text.

To complement the collaborative effort WikiGenes uses state of the art data mining technology to extract relevant content from Pubmed® of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. This precompiled information serves as a substrate and matrix to embed your contributions, but it is by no means the final word.

The WikiGenes Data Mining Engine updates WikiGenes on a daily basis.

Private Documents

You can use the WikiGenes publishing environment to manage your own private documents. Invite selected colleagues to work with you on a collaborative article and benefit from the authorship tracking technology in WikiGenes which links every sentence to its author and thus provides due credit to each of your collaborators.

If you wish you can make your documents public and embed a live version in your own website using your own layout or export it into any format. See the tutorial for more information.

Citation

A wiki for the life sciences where authorship matters. Hoffmann, R. Nature Genetics 40, 1047 - 1051 (2008) [Full text] [Pubmed]

Acknowledgements

We thank the U.S. National Library of Medicine for making Pubmed® publicly available. Please see our Open Access License for copyright information regarding data from Medline®/Pubmed®. Please see our complete list of acknowledgments.

The WikiGenes project is supported in part by the Branco Weiss Fellowship, Society in Science.

 
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