Medical Research and Social Media: Can Wikis be Used as a Publishing Platform in Medicine?

This past month marked an exciting development at Open Medicine: the launch of the Open Medicine wiki. The first publication to be housed on the wiki is a scoping review of studies examining the use of asynchronous telehealth by Deshpande and colleagues. The interactive article allows users to log in and edit, delete or add content to the review and to look at changes other users have made to the document.

Why are we using wiki technology as a publishing platform? Wikis enable a network of users to edit documents collaboratively and on an ongoing basis. This may be particularly relevant to scoping and systematic reviews, which, depending on their area of focus, can quickly become outdated as new studies are published. A wiki — a potentially revolutionary tool for knowledge transfer — makes it possible to keep reviews as current and relevant as possible. Just as knowledge evolves in medicine, a wiki evolves as new evidence emerges and is incorporated into it.

Providing authors and readers with the means to update documents has rarely been done by biomedical publishers, despite some clear advantages. First, updates are publicly available as soon as they are incorporated into the wiki. Second, wikis create a centralized platform for easy editing. Third, they offer their own form of post-publication peer review in an open space where readers can see what changes have been made to a document and — if anonymous editing is prohibited — who made those changes; consequently, contentious points undergo close scrutiny and monitoring. It is important to note that as the authorship of the article expands to those contributing to the wiki, responsibility for the content expands as well. “Peers,” in this sense, are defined as those having adequate knowledge of an area to make responsible contributions.