Annotum

My two friends called Martin have been playing with WordPress. Specifically, they've been experimenting with the Annotum WordPress theme, a.k.a. Journal-In-A-Box. Martin Fenner wrote a nice explanatory post, and hours later, Martin Weller launched his edtech metajournal.

My thoughts have been on the published evidence base recently. As MartinW points out the easy way to collate this information is to use an existing aggregator. I'd probably use a CiteULike tag, such as, for example, my Journal of Experimental Lols, but Scoop.it, Storify, or any of the other burgeoning curation services could do the job. But (subject matter aside), none of these look much like a traditional journal. Wrap Annotum in a custom URL ("Leicester Bioscience Education") and you've got something that walks like a journal and quacks like a journal.

But do I really want another editorial role? I'm currently on the editorial boards of two journals, and to be honest, I don't really get any institutional credit for that (intellectual rewards are another thing). Any idiot can be a journal editor (remember Medical Hypotheses?), but being a good journal editor is a lot of work. That wouldn't be a problem if I thought that such a metajournal would serve the purpose (custom evidence base) that I need. But if it's not published in Nature, does anyone care, and is it worth the extra work over a simple aggregator?

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