This plugin turns Wordpress into a platform for scholarly publication. It adds several fields to the user profile page
to allow you to enter institutional affiliation, department, etc. It allows you to enter in publisher, ISSN, and language information.
It outputs an abstract (taken from the post excerpt), author information, and citation links that allow readers to easily download
article citation date. It also outputs metadata to facilitate indexing in Google Scholar.
Future versions of this plugin will allow you to enter multiple authors for a single article, and will also provide a facility to organize
articles into issues and volumes.
You can see this plugin in action here (
http://www.sociology.org/featured/killing-the-little-girls-of-the-world)
Hey everybody. This is just to let you all know this is my first attempt at Wordpress coding so please be patient. I'll try and be as responsive as possible but keep in mind i"m learning as I go.
The basic goal of this plugin is to facilitate independent scholarly publication. This is publication that circumvents the traditional press and allows the scholar themselves to address the field directly. Google scholar is a great way to facilitate that since Google Scholar indexes scholarly output regardless of its associated with a journal. This gives scholars a unique opportunity to get their work out there quickly, efficiently, and without having to worry about the gatekeepers at the temple of the scholarly press. I am aware of the need to maintain quality control, and I understand peer review is part of that process, but at the same peer review slows scientific discovery down, and the commercial presses lock up scholarly output behind a pay-per-view wall that ensures only academics, and students paying high post-secondary fees, get access to academic research. This is an unfortunate situation and one that this plugin is designed to remedy. With this plugin scholars can setup their own Wordpress site easily, and then use their Wordpress installation to put out their scholarship to the world. The hope here is that scholars will take this opportunity and use it NOT to duplicate functions already handled well by the traditional scholarly presses (i.e. peer review), but to take the opportunity and not only speed up scholarly communication, but bring scholarship directly to the world.
If you want a model of what is possible here consider The Socjourn (
http://www.sociology.org). This journal publishes scholarly research, and research commentary, aimed not at other scholars, but at the general population. Academic jargon is limited and the goal is open and grounded communication. Academics take their own research, or the research of others, and write about it in a way that speaks to relevant social issues (like for example child abuse, see link below). Write a good scholarly article, get this article indexed by Google Scholar, and have a greater IMPACT not only scholarly research (by speeding up dissemination of your thoughts), but on society as a whole.
Anyway, that's the purpose. Feedback is welcome but patience is a virtue. Also, if you are a scholar and you want to take up the challenge, make sure you spend some time practicing your communication skills. The kind of writing you do for a peer reviewed scholarly journal in your own discipline is not the kind of writing you should do for a blog designed to disseminate your thinking to a wider academic, or general audience. See this article on
how to write badly.
http://www.sociology.org/columnists/michael-sosteric/sociology-versus-psychology-the-social-context-of-psychological-pathology-and-child-abuse