The renaming of WikiSym to OpenSym and the scope extension from “everything wiki” to “everything open” has invalidated various metrics of scholarly assessment and so we wanted to ask your opinion on how to position the revamped conference.

In the past, WikiSym was a computer science conference. The influx of Wikipedia researchers has benefitted the conference and the community and extended our scope. Still, WikiSym had a strong computer science focus. The expected influx of open access, open data, open source, open educational resources, open innovation, etc. research will further sharpen the profile of the conference. We certainly won’t be a pure computer science conference any longer.

The main academic validation of WikiSym, now OpenSym, in the past was the validation through the ACM. To achieve in-cooperation status, the conference is screened by the ACM SIG that is providing the status for its proper academic behavior, most notably, the research program committee process. We have passed this screening successfully every year and were therefore able to put our proceedings into the ACM digital library. We never cared much about impact factor etc.

Our more inclusionary nature now beyond computer science has made us take notice of broader academic requirements. One step forward was the introduction of “research-in-progress” presentations that allowed social science researchers to participate in the conference with a presentation yet not to hand over the copyright to the ACM but to move on with their work to a journal publication.

Beyond this we need to understand how to relate to impact factors, citation indexes, and the commercial entities behind them (Thomson Reuters, Google, etc.)

Your valued opinion is much appreciated. Where would you like to see OpenSym listed?