Grants talk:IEG/STM Lab

STM Lab is an awesome initiative. This is a perfect way to increase the visibility of scientific and scholarly articles published to larger mass of researchers and academics, particularly students in underfunded colleges and universities for whom paywalls are a big barrier. I have seen and experienced the work of Mr.C V Radhakrishnan and Mr.Krishnan and would endorse wholeheartedly their skill to accomplish this project. D.Nandakumar Ph.D Associate Professor in Geography University College Trivandrum 695034 India

This is a very worthwhile project that potentially could be quite important. I have been impressed with Mr. Radhakrishnan's efforts in taking over and maintaining the "text4ht" project following the untimely 2009 death of its founder. William F. Hammond Associate Professor Emeritus of Mathematics State University of New York at Albany Albany, New York (USA) http://www.albany.edu/~hammond Hammondwfsr (talk) 23:10, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

117.213.4.8 16:07, 7 February 2013 (UTC) Open Research today implies removal of knowledge bottle necks and efforts at trans-disciplinary and collaborative methods. Mr Radhakrishnan and Mr Krishna are excellent people with social commitment and intellectual worries which brought them to KCHR and into our project, 'Digitising Kerala's Past'. It is my pleasure to wish them best in their new venture to strengthen Open Research.

Professor. P.J.Cherian, Director KCHR & Pattanam Archaeological Research, PB 839, Vyloppilly Samskrithi Bhavan Nalanda, Thiruvananthapuram- 695 003 Tel: / Fax : 0471 2310409/ 6574988 E Mail : kchrtvm@gmail.com Website: www.keralahistory.ac.in

Wikiversity research

Hi. Could you please elaborate on the differences between the proposed project, and the existing research in Wikiversity ? Will there be any differences in mechanisms, audiences ... etc? Thanks. --Haithams (talk) 23:51, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

• Wikiversity Research is concerned with real research — identifying the problem, conceiving, planning, differentiating methodologies, literature collection, experiments, surveys, analysis and arriving at results — while STM Lab is limited to post-research scenario. The main concern is how to generate documents of research with the help of data acquired and results arrived at, neatly typeset and present it to the reading community as per the conventions of the discipline chosen. Although technologies are open to all, people still find it difficult to generate future proof documents in the form of XML/MathML when they have large amounts of math/technical content in their articles. Scientists often fumble at this point, the only choice is to rely on traditional publishing corporations who are keen to transfer the copyrights to them so that they can safely close the articles from public access once published. This inability of authors to publish themselves has caused the taxpayer to pay twice — once to fund the research and secondly to read the published articles which are nothing but the results of their own funded research — on one hand and on the other hand dependence on proprietary corporations results in hoarding knowledge generated out of public funded research behind paywalls. STM Lab is a humble attempt to address this problem to empower the author. This problem has been discussed here also. CV Radhakrishnan (talk) 00:33, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

New website?

Can you explain what the formal outcome of this project is? Is it a new, standalone, wiki with custom features? Or, is it a tool/gadget that can be plugged-in to existing medawiki instances? Wittylama (talk) 01:38, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

• The formal outcome shall be an extension to existing mediawiki. But of course, there are document processing requirements and hence server side requirements are a bit demanding. For instance, TeX and friends are used to generate pdf, XML, HTML, MathML from LaTeX input, which means the extension has to take care of integrating complex systems like TeX with mediawiki and sever should have a working TeXLive system. Anyway, the design goal is that any existing mediawiki instance shall be able to accept the extension and work seamlessly. — CV Radhakrishnan (talk) 05:51, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Outcomes and their assessment

If I understand it correctly, there seems to be two main prospected outcomes in this project: publications and software. Grants:IEG/STM_Lab#Measures_of_success states that the project will be assessed by the number of articles contributed via the new tools. What you explained above sounds like you put focus onto the software, not publications. If the two both would be equally important outcomes of the project, would you perhaps consider assessing directly the software, such as by checking user satisfaction, etc? --whym (talk) 13:40, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Response

• I believe that there exists a cause-effect relationship between processing software and publication so far as research articles are concerned. The prime reason for this is that output depends largely on the discipline to which content belongs to and its conventions, mostly very rigid. For instance, American Psychological Association have rigid citation and bibliography listing style (called APA style) and invariably research articles in Psychology have to follow this. Unlike other forms of publications, the software cannot dictate the format of the output, instead the software shall dutifully follow the conventions and generate output in full agreement with all that is demanded by the discipline. The success of the software depends on the fidelity of output with requirements and again with least effort on the part of author.

• So far as Wikipedia is concerned, the input of textual sources and presentation of output fall in a general category without a plethora of varied and specialized formats/conventions which helped Wikipedia to obsolete traditional print oriented encyclopedia of proprietary corporations successfully to the entire satisfaction of all concerned in the process, which is a great achievement of mankind. However, this didn't happen in the case of research articles owing to diversified and rigid conventions and MediaWiki's inability to cope up to generate the requisite output to the satisfaction of authors. Hence, MediaWiki sadly failed to eclipse the traditional academic publishing corporations and hence couldn't prevent the continuance of scientific knowledge being hoarded in the vaults of these corporations even today.

• Having said the above, it becomes clear that the prime factor is the software infrastructure which if properly developed and equipped to accept scientific textual input and to generate the kind of output as wanted by the scientific community, WikiMedia will again be going to revolutionize the scientific document world, maybe the second greatest revolution after Wikipedia. You will also note that number of publications and user satisfaction are intimately related and are synonymous in this context.

— CV Radhakrishnan (talk) 05:35, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. In that case, does it make sense for you to write in the proposal a little bit of words on the specifications, such as "The new tools will be customisable to conform with a number of widely accepted academic style formats of scientific papers including the APA style, ..."? --whym (talk) 13:00, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

How and where will the articles get published?

As far as I understand this proposal is primarily about producing new authoring tool and publishing tool for academic papers as a MediaWiki extension. In what way do you expect papers authored with these new tools get published? On one of existing Wikimedia wikis, a new Wikimedia project, or somewhere else? Would they be presented as wiki pages, files, or something else? --whym (talk) 13:07, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Community discussions

There seem to be no notification placed in Wikimedia communities so far. (if you already did, please list them in the proposal) Would you perhaps want to notify Wikiversity, Wikibooks, relevant WikiProjects on Wikipedia such as w:WP:WikiProject Citation cleanup and/or mail:wiki-research-l to encourage their opinions? (note that not all of these would be necessary to be notified) When notifying, I would encourage adding some words about your thoughts on how this proposal will possibly help them. --whym (talk) 13:12, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Budget breakdown

Note: I am commenting on this version of the grant proposal.

I am of the opinion that the grant proposal would greatly benefit from some more detail on the budget breakdown. As of yet, it is not at all clear what the money would actually be used for (with the exception of the programming budget, which is fairly obvious).

• "Project management": Who does this refer to? Is this for CV Radhakrishnan and GS Krishna, or someone else? How did you arrive at the $2500 figure?
• "Hardware": Does this mean servers? If so, how many and what kind? If not, what does it refer to?
• "Hired document writer/copy editor": This is the entry that I find most mysterious. Is this person's role to help the researchers write their documents? Or is it to write on-site documentation?

Any clarification here would be helpful, and strongly recommended considering the scale of this endeavor. --Cryptic C62 (talk) 14:06, 18 May 2013 (UTC)