Hi Yana,
To build on Daniel's comment re inclusion of OA in Wikimania this year, Jimmy spoke on
an OA panel Daniel and I participated in. Jimmy gave four great reasons as to why OA is
important to Wikimedia. Unfortunately, I was chairing the session, and didn't write
them all down, but perhaps Daniel remembers, as Jimmy framed his talk very well. I believe
three of them were:
OA is important to Wikimedia as it provides access to research in:
- developing countries
- everyone with Jack Andraka as an example
- the OA scholarly research which is made available which can be used to develop WMF
projects
Cheers,
Melissa Hagemann
-----Original Message-----
From: openaccess-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:openaccess-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Mietchen
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2014 12:42 AM
To: Open Access discussions
Subject: Re: [OpenAccess] Blog post on Open Access
Thanks, Yana. Comments inline.
On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 2:52 AM, Yana Welinder <ywelinder(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
We are doing a guest blog post on open access for EFF
next week.
Cool!
Free as in Open Access and Wikipedia
Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites are closely connected to open
access ideals
"ideals" has a bit too much of a romantic connotation here. Something
like "goals" would be better, I think.
of making scholarship freely available and reusable.
Consistent with
these ideals, the Wikimedia sites make information available to
internet users around the world free of charge in hundreds of
languages. Wikimedia content can also be reused under its free
licenses. The content is enriched by citations to open access
scholarship, and the Wikimedia sites play a unique role in making
academic learning easily available to the world. As the next
generation of scholars embraces open access principles to become a
true Generation Open,
- the video linked there is licensed -NC-ND (as displayed shortly before the end,
and contrary to the CC BY indicated in the metadata), so I would not link to it.
- "true" in such contexts is also problematic, especially near non-open licenses
and considering that open access refers only to access to (some of the) final outputs of
research, rather than all outputs and the entire process.
we will move closer to "a world in which every
single human being can
freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
To write and edit Wikipedia, contributors need to access high quality
independent sources. Unfortunately, paywalls and copyright
restrictions often prevent the use of academic journals to write
Wikipedia articles and enrich them with citations. Citations are
particularly important to allow readers to verify Wikipedia articles
and learn more about the topic from the underlying sources. Given the
importance of open access to Wikipedia, the Wikimedia community of
contributors has set up
I don't think that "set up" should be linked, and the link currently
in there is not a good fit anyway (it would fit better to the "importance of open
access to Wikipedia" phrase above or the "closely connected" one from the
introductory sentence, or the "reciprocal relationship" below).
a WikiProject Open Access to
improve open access-related articles on Wikipedia
and to increase the reuse of open-access materials on Wikimedia platforms more
generally, e.g. as per
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Open_Access_Media_Importer_Bot
or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access/Signalling_…
.
For an overview of activities, see the monthly reports at
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:This_Month_in_GLAM_Open_Access…
.
and create an Open Access
Policy for research projects with the support of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Those were not the goals of the creation of the WikiProject, and the policy - which
is still in draft stage, by the way - has not received support from the Foundation, and
that link is to a page that is misleading in the context of this blog post, as it only
clarifies the meaning of the term "significant support" for the purposes of that
draft policy.
Great potential lies in the reciprocal relationship
between the open
access scholarship that enriches Wikipedia and Wikipedia’s promotion
of primary sources. As a secondary source, Wikipedia does not publish
ideas or facts that are not supported by reliable and published
sources. Wikipedia has tremendous power as a platform for relaying the
outcomes of academic study by leading over 400 million monthly
visitors to underlying scholarship cited in articles. Just as a
traditional encyclopedia would, Wikipedia can make the underlying
research easier to find. But unlike a traditional encyclopedia, it
provides free access and free reuse to all. In that sense, Wikipedia is an ideal
secondary source for open access research.
Here, it would be appropriate to mention the Open Access Reader project:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Access_Reader .
In light of this, we are thrilled to see Generation
Open blooming.
Not sure what you see blooming here.
The
Digital Commons Network now boasts 1,109,355 works from 358 institutions.
Most of these are actually not openly licensed.
The Directory of Open Access Journals further has over
10,035 journals
"over 10,000" would be more appropriate.
from 135 countries.
Esteemed law journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and
Technology, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and Michigan Law Review
subscribe to the Open Access Law Program, which encourages them to
archive their articles under open access principles.
These journals archive their content under free-to-read principles, with limited
options for reuse. See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Open_Access_Initiative#Definition_of…
.
Wikipedians are also contributing to the body of
published open access
scholarship. Earlier this month, four Wikipedians published an article
on Dengue fever in Open Medicine (an open access and peer-reviewed
journal) based on a Wikipedia article that was collaboratively edited
by 1,369
"over 1,300" may be better here
volunteers and bots. In addition to providing an open
access scholarly
article on this important topic, this publication validated that
Wikipedia's editorial process can produce high quality content outside
traditional academia.
Yes.
It is worth mentioning that many more Wikipedia articles already incorporate text from
openly licensed scholarly articles (cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_articles_incorporating_tex…
) and that a subset thereof (cf.
http://topicpages.ploscompbiol.org/wiki/Category:PLoS_Computational_Biology…)
have actually been written by scholars for that purpose and published in a peer-reviewed
journal.
Placing scholarship behind paywalls has the effect of
relegating new
advances in human knowledge to small academic communities. As more
academics allow their work to be shared freely, online secondary
sources like Wikipedia will play a large role disseminating the
knowledge to more people in new regions and on different devices.
Yup. Perhaps worth mentioning that there was an entire Wikimania track devoted to
Open Scholarship this year (with a focus on Open Access;
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Scholarship ) and that Wikimedia-related
talks have been given at Open Access meetings (e.g.
http://river-valley.zeeba.tv/transparency-in-measures-of-scientific-impact/
or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Talks/COASP_2014
).
Last but not least, Open Access Week has a Wikidata item (
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2000002 ) and that Wikimedians have actively participated
in it in the past (e.g.
https://p2pu.org/en/groups/open-access-wikipedia-challenge/ ).
Looking forward to the next version of your post, Daniel
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