Finding high quality up to date reviews on the current literature is always a little hit and miss. Jason Kelly has started a new page on the OpenWetWare wiki for WikiReviews (via Pedro and Depak). As Pedro points out, Writing a review on the progress of a field could be the most obvious use of collaborative efforts. The reviews could be continually updated and periodic versions could be frozen and submitted to a more conventional repository.
It has been suggested that people start by taking a current review and posting it on the wiki. The obvious places, actually I should say the only places, to find CC licensed scientific papers are PLOS and BioMed Central, however that limits the number of articles up for adoption for WikiReviews.
For example, I would like to post the review Comparative Microarray Analysis to WikiReivews. I have many notes I have taken on the subject which could be added and also a list of references published since the review that could be added. But alas, it is behind a pay wall. One of the authors has a new research publication in BMC Bioinformatics, could I get around the licensing on the review by asking the author for a preprint to wikify ?
Another good thing about PLOS is that this article, which might also serve as the basis for a WikiReview on comparative microarray analysis, can be downloaded as XML. I haven't touched XSLT in a while, but I'm sure it would be possible to write a transform to the Wiki format used by media wiki.
Bonus Link: While I was checking out Depak's blog, I discovered a nice video of Depak giving a lightning talk on open science.
Comments
simple but brilliant
This is one of those simple, obvious yet brilliant ideas and the perfect example when you want to tell people about "overturning the publishing paradigm". Authors spend months compiling authoratative reference works, hundreds of pages and references and then - they're out of date as soon as they're published and languish in some journal archive, never to be read again. On the other hand, a reference work that you update continually - now that's a resource.
It is simple, however the
It is simple, however the walled garden of scientific publishing has immediately reared its ugly head. The first suggestion to use OA/CC licensed works as the starting point has limited the available reivews. Turning to non-OA Journals, the second suggestion was to ask authors to release their pre-prints as CC'd works. Whether or not this is even possible has caused some discussion on the Reviews talk page. I'm beginning to think that starting from scratch is the most straight forward option.