CZ:Biology Week/PLoS

One way to initiate some repetitive interaction between CZ and more traditional venues of scholarly communication like science journals would be a community page article in PLoS Biology (an Open Access journal, and perhaps the most widely read one in biology) describing the concept of Biology Week to a life science audience. The author guidelines for this are here, and previous examples of such community pages include

• The Costs of Exclusion: Recognizing a Role for Local Communities in Biodiversity Conservation,
• CAMERA: A Community Resource for Metagenomics,
• Peer Review - The Newcomers' Perspective and
• Rethinking Outreach: Teaching the Process of Science through Modeling.

In order to harness the powers of a wiki for drafting the article, I suggest we do that here, in close collaboration with the CZ:Biology Workgroup and anybody else interested in Biology Week.

Aims of the article

Main points to make, considering the audience at PLoS Biology:

• What is Biology Week?
  • Give first occurence (September 22-28, 2008) and details on planned regularity
• Why should readers (scientists, teachers, students, interested public) participate in it?
  • What sorts of contributions are possible and/or expected (here, the groups should be addressed separately, though that's not easy within a concise piece of narrative writing)?
• Mention other CZ Workgroup weeks, most notably those for Health sciences and Anthropology, as these fields have a large overlap with Biology
• Describe options for integration with other free educational projects

Schedule

• July 7, submit manuscript
• June 30, first draft finished, invite community feedback
• June 20, structure of article finished
• June 18, suggested phrasing to appropriately reflect the state of discussion on Things to be decided upon before first Biology Week.

Draft

Text

Up to 1200 words.

The Citizendium (CZ) - a wiki that allows registered, non-anonymous authors to edit any article, with the results approved by qualified editors - is planning a big "online convention" of Biologists on the Citizendium. For all biologists this is a chance to make a difference.

The Citizendium was developed with the belief that "There is a better way for humanity to come together to make an encyclopedia."

Since only "real names" are used, The Citizendium has virtually no vandalism and very little abuse of any kind.

Domain experts are given credence in CZ, since a project devoted to knowledge ought to give special inducements to people who make it their life's work to know things.

The Citizendium features the rule of law, not anarchy and not mob rule.

In time, the article anyone contributes to will be approved by an expert editor, and so represented to the world as containing a credible, reliable introduction to a topic.

Imagine enormous quantities of content combined with the highest quality and exhaustiveness of scope. To given thrust to the ever-expanding field of Biology, the "Biology Week" will be the first of the different weeks planned for each discipline. It is scheduled to be held during September 22 to September 28, 2008.

Image or box?

We can have either an image or a box but perhaps the box might contain an image. I would suggest to go for a box that lists the key properties of CZ with respect to similar projects readers might be familiar with (mainly EB and WP). A good image would probably be of help, and something in the style of or would seem appropriate - the field is depicted as a whole, yet its diversity is evident, too. Any idea how we can get the idea of a recurrent Biology week into such a figure?