New subject: [Fwd: Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)]

15 Mar 2011

--------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks
on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
From:    "Andreas Kolbe" &lt;jayen466(a)yahoo.com&gt;
Date:    Tue, March 15, 2011 6:32 am
To:      "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
&lt;foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

--- On Tue, 15/3/11, David Goodman &lt;dggenwp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
...
  From: David Goodman &lt;dggenwp(a)gmail.com&gt; 
...
  I've been involved with open 
 access journals  as a professional
 activity from the start of the movement, long before I
 joined
 Wikipedia. There has been only limited success. 
 Though there are
 almost ten thousand open access journals, 95% of them are
 either very
 small or very unimportant, and  in almost all fields
 of study, none or
 almost none of the important journals are open access: 

This is my experience too; thanks for pointing it out.

...
  No important journals at all in chemistry are open
access,
 Almost none in physics
 Almost none in geology
 Almost none in ecology & evolution
 A few in molecular & cell biology
 A few only in biomedical sciences
 None in psychology
 Almost none in the social sciences or the humanities
 Almost none in engineering and applied science
 A few in medicine <snip>
...
  At this point, there is no academic field of study
 whatsoever where an
 adequate article could be written using only open access
 material.
 This is of course a very limiting thing for access to
 information not
 just for us, but for the world in general, and the WMF
 projects should
 certainly cooperate  as closely as possible with the
 forces working
 for open access, but the suggestion that it is possible to
 limit to or
 even prefer open acces material is incompatible with the
 policy on
 using the best available sources. 

Could someone from the Foundation please respond to the idea of contacting
universities and content database providers and inviting them to support
Wikipedia by making a certain number of log-in IDs available, with the
benefit -- to them -- that increased citation of high-quality publications
would potentially make these publications visible to a larger audience?

Is this something the Foundation would consider pursuing?

Andreas

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