On 09 April 2020 at 18:00 Richard Nevell <richard.nevell@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:

If anybody needs familiarity with the sourcing standards for medical articles, take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(medicine) - although most of the content will only need to meet the usual standards for sourcing that you're used to.

Richard Nevell, on behalf of Wikimedia UK

Doug Taylor, on behalf of Wikimedia Medicine

Yes, that's an important point in practice.

The extraordinary times Covid-19 has brought with it have seen the major medical journal publishers react. This Twitter thread is very helpful with the open access aspects of the huge volume of publications:

https://twitter.com/MsPhelps/status/1249662402255298560

Temporarily, much more of the literature is going to be available to read, on the PubMed Central repository, than would usually be the case. The actual details of all that could be the basis of a crash course on open access. And why it matters. 

The bibliographical situation that is emerging is scary, really. Let's note that Wikidata can help cope: by holding details on papers, and data giving an idea of the reliability of journals. By capturing Creative Commons license information. By allowing us to add topical information. And with queries that are quite intuitive, supporting use and maintenance of the data.

Charles