Talk:Call for papers

External links criteria
May I ask who the editor of the Call for Papers page is? I have attempted to engage an Andy J. Smith on matter of the criteria for the placement of external links on the page, but that did not result in the most cordial of discussions.

Thank you for your trouble. 209.237.75.130 (talk) 19:44, 25 October 2010 (UTC)Hope Leman
 * Just about anyone can be an editor; you can see a list of accounts/ips that have edited the page if you go here. Have you read the guidelines about external links? Please feel free to discuss the merits of the ResearchRaven link here; Andyjsmith (doesn't matter a whit who Andyjsmith really is) felt it was too "limited" - can you respond to that particular claim? ErikHaugen (talk) 20:56, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Hi, Erik. Thank you so much for your very courteous note. I very much appreciate your willingness to consider the merits of possibly including a link to ResearchRaven on the Wikipedia Call for Papers page.

I am asking for the link because I believe that ResearchRaven provides a service to the health sciences community and that that community is somewhat underserved on the Wikipedia Call for Papers page as it is now constituted. ResearchRaven is listed as one of the electronic resources of the Countway Library of Medicine, for instance, (see https://dev.www.countway.harvard.edu/dl/resources.html?search=1&typeId=9) and given that that library serves the Harvard Medical School and Boston Medical Library communities, I would say that is a good gauge of the robustness of ResearchRaven.

Another example of its use is that by the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine http://calder.med.miami.edu/catalog/subject/meetings_and_conferences.html.

Additionally, the point of ResearchRaven is to enable those without access to resource-rich resources to find calls for papers and thereby contribute to the scholarly corpus

We also try on ResearchRaven to create links between those in the humanities, social sciences and those in the health sciences and I feel that the categories Literature and Medicine, Medical Humanities, History of Medicine, and History are of genuine value for all of those communities.

Anyway, thank you so much for your patient tutelage in the ins and outs of Wikipedia. I simply want to share useful, free resources with researchers and the general public and that is something that Wikipedia stands for.

Gratefully,

Hope —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.237.75.130 (talk) 21:50, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm having trouble forming an opinion about this link specifically, so hopefully others will weigh in here, but it kind of feels to me like this article has become little more than a directory listing; I think it might be worth considering removing every one of these links. Also, Hope, if you are inserting links to a group you are affiliated with please read the note here about conflicts of interest. Thanks for taking the time to work on Wikipedia! ErikHaugen (talk) 22:21, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Hi, Erik. Thank you for yet another nice note. Thanks for the tactful nudge towards the conflict of interest page. Ah, me! I am indeed employed where the link I want to add originates so that is a fairly cut and dried conflict of interest. Total bummer-roo! But I also want to help researchers for purely altruistic reasons (and practical ones--as we will all be patients someday).
 * Let's pass over this whole business of page ownership, although I can't stop myself from commenting that a somewhat shirty challenge on my Talk page to prove my bonafides as an editor is not really the same thing as a rational discussion "on the matter of the criteria for the placement of external links on the page". The criteria are clearly laid down at WP:EL and elsewhere, as stated in my edit summary when I removed the link. The big problem with ResearchRaven is that it has only 378 conferences, compared with say 14,400 for Eventseer. That's such a limited resource that I simply can't see any way it enhances the article. I'm now also alerted to the fact that the site is the work of the person who is attempting to promote it via wikipedia, which raises issues of WP:COI and possibly WP:SPAM. andy (talk) 22:31, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with you that the page could use some hefty beefing up vis-a-vis substance (as opposed to links) and also should reflect the fact that the whole realm of calls for papers will almost certainly change radically in coming years as Open Access grows and the pre-print culture takes hold. I would be happy to help with the editing.

Anyway, thank you again for all your help. I think you should work for the UN or the State Department. Hope Leman —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.237.75.130 (talk) 22:37, 25 October 2010 (UTC)