A Wiki for Collaboration and Publication in Research

Wikis are used by many projects as part of a collaboration platform. Yet, they have not been adopted by the majority of researchers for creating permanent scientific output. In this paper we try to overcome the shortcomings of Wikis by replacing their persistence layer by a digital object repository. Our solution, which combines JSPWiki and Fedora, provides automatic provenance metadata, assigns persistent identifiers, takes care of proper versioning, and prepares the Wiki´s content for long term archival. Our architecture allows the Wiki application to be run by a temporary project, whereas the digital object repository can be maintained by a long-lasting organization.We discuss the possible impact of this approach for collaboration and publication in research.