WikiJournal: How Community-Reviewed Open-Access Publishing Works

WikiJournal is the collective name for a small family of peer-reviewed, open-access academic journals — currently WikiJournal of Medicine, WikiJournal of Science, and WikiJournal of Humanities — published by the volunteer-run WikiJournal User Group. Its distinguishing feature is a direct, structural link to Wikipedia: articles are peer-reviewed in the same open, transparent way Wikipedia content is edited, and the resulting citable, DOI-assigned publications can be integrated back into Wikipedia articles. This guide explains how the model works, how it fits into the wider open-access and peer review landscape, and — carefully, because this is a lower-profile publishing venue that is easy to either dismiss or overstate — exactly what its current indexing and recognition status is.

What WikiJournal is

The WikiJournal User Group is a non-profit organization (registered in Sweden in 2016) that was recognized as a Wikimedia movement affiliate (“user group”) that same year. It is not an official Wikimedia Foundation sister project in the way Wikipedia, Wikidata, or Wikisource are — a formal proposal to make WikiJournal an independent Wikimedia sister project was submitted to the WMF Board of Trustees in 2020 and, as of this writing, has not been adopted. In practice, the journals’ editorial content and processes are hosted and coordinated on Wikiversity, a genuine Wikimedia sister project, while the WikiJournal User Group itself operates as an independently governed academic publisher.

Each WikiJournal title covers a broad subject scope, run by its own volunteer editorial board of academics and subject specialists:

• WikiJournal of Medicine — medicine and biomedicine; launched 2014; ISSN 2002-4436.
• WikiJournal of Science — natural sciences, mathematics, engineering, and technology.
• WikiJournal of Humanities — humanities, arts, and social sciences.

All three are diamond open access: free for readers to read and free for authors to publish, with no article processing charge. Published articles carry a Creative Commons license, receive a Crossref-registered DOI, and are deposited with services such as Google Scholar and WorldCat.

How the peer review model works

WikiJournal’s review process follows a conventional external peer review structure — typically at least two independent subject-matter reviewers assess a submission before publication — but applies Wikipedia’s editing culture to how that review is conducted and disclosed:

• Reviews are published, not hidden. Once an article is accepted, the reviewer reports themselves are made publicly accessible alongside the article, rather than remaining internal correspondence between editor and author, matching the broader shift toward open peer review that outlets like PLOS ONE, eLife, and F1000Research have also adopted in different forms.
• Reviewer identity is usually disclosed, but not mandatory. Reviewers are encouraged to sign their reports publicly, which the project reports the large majority choose to do; a reviewer may request anonymity, in which case their identity is known only to the handling editor and a peer-review coordinator.
• Review doesn’t fully stop at publication. Because the underlying content lives on a wiki, articles remain open to public discussion and correction after formal publication, in addition to the pre-publication review round — an explicit form of post-publication peer review layered on top of a standard pre-publication process.
• Dual output format. An accepted article is published twice: as a fixed, citable, typeset PDF (the version of record, carrying the DOI) and as an editable wiki page that can continue to be revised under normal wiki editing rules.

The relationship to Wikipedia and Wikimedia

The mechanism that makes WikiJournal distinctive is bidirectional content flow between the journal and Wikipedia:

• An article can start life as an existing Wikipedia article that a subject expert nominates for external peer review, or it can be written from scratch and submitted directly to the journal.
• After the article passes peer review, suitable text, figures, and citations from the reviewed, published version are integrated back into the corresponding Wikipedia article — with a citation and link back to the stable, indexed WikiJournal version.
• The practical effect is that a Wikipedia article can carry content that has been through a form of named academic peer review, and the expert reviewer or author gets a conventional, DOI-bearing, citable publication credit for work that would otherwise be invisible in most researcher-evaluation contexts (Wikipedia edits are not normally citable as scholarly output).

This is the model’s actual value proposition for research administration purposes: it gives academics and clinicians a citable, peer-reviewed publication credit for improving freely available reference content, and it gives Wikipedia a documented channel for expert-reviewed material — rather than functioning as a general-purpose venue competing directly with disciplinary journals for original research.

Indexing and recognition status — what’s actually verified

Because WikiJournal is easy to either wrongly dismiss as “just Wikipedia” or wrongly inflate as equivalent to an established disciplinary journal, it’s worth being precise about where it currently stands, based on the journals’ own published records:

• DOAJ: WikiJournal of Medicine has been listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) since 2019 — DOAJ listing requires a journal to meet DOAJ’s baseline peer-review and editorial-transparency criteria, so this is a genuine, checkable indicator of legitimacy, though it is not equivalent to inclusion in a major citation database.
• Scopus: WikiJournal of Medicine has been accepted for Scopus coverage. Scopus acceptance involves review by the independent Content Selection and Advisory Board against editorial-quality and regularity criteria.
• PubMed Central: As of the journal’s own published application record, WikiJournal of Medicine has applied for PubMed Central indexing and has not yet passed NLM’s review; NLM’s stated feedback cited inconsistency in the scientific and editorial quality of articles assessed. It is not currently indexed in PubMed Central, and researchers should not assume PubMed discoverability.
• Web of Science: Not indexed as of the journal’s own status pages; this is listed as an aspiration, not a current fact.
• Journal Impact Factor: WikiJournal titles do not currently carry a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor, which follows directly from not (yet) being indexed in Web of Science’s Journal Citation Reports.
• COPE membership: WikiJournal of Medicine is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which is a relevant editorial-standards signal independent of citation-index coverage.

The honest summary: WikiJournal is a small-scale, genuinely peer-reviewed, DOAJ-listed and Scopus-covered open-access publishing operation with real editorial infrastructure and COPE membership — but it is not (yet) indexed in PubMed Central or Web of Science, has no Journal Impact Factor, publishes a comparatively small volume of articles per title, and is not an official Wikimedia Foundation project. Research offices and authors evaluating it should treat it the same way they would evaluate any small, specialist open-access title: check current DOAJ/Scopus status directly rather than relying on secondhand claims, and weigh its narrow reach and low article volume against its transparent review process and lack of publication fees.

Frequently asked questions

Is WikiJournal the same thing as Wikipedia?

No. Wikipedia is a general-purpose encyclopedia that anyone can edit, with no formal external peer review of individual edits. WikiJournal is a separate, peer-reviewed academic publisher whose reviewed content can subsequently be incorporated into Wikipedia articles, but publication in a WikiJournal title and editing Wikipedia are distinct activities with different processes and different citability.

Is WikiJournal peer reviewed?

Yes. Submissions go through mandatory external peer review by independent subject-matter reviewers — typically at least two per article — before publication, and the review reports themselves are published for transparency. See CASRAI’s general guide on how to know if an article is peer reviewed for the criteria that distinguish this from unreviewed content.

Is WikiJournal indexed in PubMed?

Not as of the journals’ own published application status. WikiJournal of Medicine has applied for PubMed Central indexing but has not yet passed the National Library of Medicine’s review. It is indexed in DOAJ and covered by Scopus.

Does publishing in WikiJournal cost anything?

No. WikiJournal titles operate on a diamond open-access model — no article processing charge for authors, and no subscription or paywall for readers.

Who runs WikiJournal?

An independent, volunteer-run non-profit called the WikiJournal User Group, recognized as a Wikimedia movement affiliate. It is hosted on Wikiversity infrastructure but is not an official Wikimedia Foundation sister project; a 2020 proposal to make it one is still pending with the WMF Board of Trustees.