On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 22:03, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: There's a nice little undercurrent of paper exchange - some legitimate (asking the author for copies, getting PDFs from author websites, getting stuff from university pre-print draft repositories), some not so legitimate (*cough*BitTorrent*cough*) - much as there is in science, dampened only by the fact that less work in the humanities is done in journal papers and more in books. Sadly, compared to science, the embrace of the alternative (open access, Creative Commons etc.) is very slow. Although the argument for public access and against oligopoly publishers that is used for open access science also applies in the humanities, in science it is strengthened by the desire for open access data that the published study draw on be also be made available online, while in, say, philosophy, Plato and Kant are already meet the 'open access' standard. ;-) A lot of the slightly older stuff is in JSTOR, which isn't open access, but the access requirements demanded of subscribing institutions go in the 'fairly expensive' category rather than the 'brutally fisted with stinging nettles by Satan himself' category. -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality.

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 10:45 PM, David Richfield &lt;davidrichfield(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: We need a Wikijournal project, where scientists can do all the functions of a journal without any prior approval-- collectively form groups, review, and publish. Free content is going to capture science eventually-- scientists want open content too badly for the research journal monopoly to last forever. The only question is-- how can WM help ignite this revolution waiting to happen? If we're really lucky, can we ourselves be the home to the successor of the for-profit journal system.

Once it is published, can't it just go to Wikisource? Or would it have to be CC-By or something like that. If so, Wikisource would still be the best suited for that, we would just have to put it in a journal namespace or something along that line. On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 4:17 PM, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

A "free journal" would be very unlike our existing projects. The scientists need to be able to just take their entire publication process to a free platform-- with no other alterations in how they do things. Science is its own community, so it wouldn't be a project that 'anyone can edit', it would a project that does exactly what the existing process does, except for free. And being free is inherently better. Nobody who spends two years of their life on a two page article wants to see it hidden behind a pay wall. Scientists really want to be free, they just need the right partner to help them. Alec

On de.wikisource.org they scan every page of the original text, upload the scan on Commons and show the scan on the right part of every page as an image. It is even obligatory to have the original scan of the text. The following page is an example: http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Seite:Oberamt_Tettnang_231.jpg (I just hit the random page) Greetings Ting Am 07.07.2011 07:57, schrieb Andrea Zanni: -- Ting Ting's Blog: http://wingphilopp.blogspot.com/

There are some extensions out there to accept latex and convert it to wikitext. CK12 used one, I believe. That seems like an easy improvement to wikisource, not a separate project. I agree that we could have a wikijournal for contemporary publication - as a WS namespace if not a separate project. PLoS and arXiv offer some guidelines for low-overhead moderation, and we could have a 'quarantine' for possible crank submissions that are posted but not yet given that light review. We have enough attention now in most sciences, if not in every field, to get input from solid reviewers. S. On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 3:50 AM, Andrea Zanni &lt;zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Samuel Klein          identi.ca:sj           w:user:sj          +1 617 529 4266

2011/7/9 &lt;Birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com&gt; Yes, this is true, but as you know well this already much work. If you are a scholar/student, and you want to share an article or a dissertation, you need to know a lot of about the architecture of Wikisource, and recreate the logical structure of a thesis, format it in wiki-text and proofread throurogh 3 quality levels in not a simple, easy job. I agree, but I always feel a little discomfort when I know that proofreading has just been done on a born-digital text, and I need to spend hours on that text just to find some typos (maybe it's me, but sometimes I don't find it worth it) Yes, it is definiw ittely worth it to put all these text on Wikisource. I uploaded my thesis years ago, also with the explicit aim to test the potential hypertextual features of Wikisource (in it.source we have proper template for Work and Author citations, and I find them the real added value of our digital library). My point (working in an academic digital library and just seeing the amount of thesis, dissertation, articles passing by) is that if for people is a difficult, overcomplicated burden to upload a PDF in an institutional repository (5 minutes of their time, even less), how can we wikilibrarians think that they will come to us and upload and "curate" their text? I clearly remeber the "Screw it" feeling I had the day after I graduated, meaning that I would not even touch my thesis again for the next months (and so it was). I'm not offering solutions here, but if we want to work in the direction of Open Access and of reaching a massive audience out there, maybe we should think out of the (current) box. Aubrey BirgitteSB

Andrea, I hear you suggesting that we need a different upload process for pdfs and other documents, wherein when you upload them there is a "digital document to paged wikitext" script that runs and generates an appropriate result, which can then be imported elsewhere on the projects as needed. Right - these should be doable by different people. An ambassador to an institutional repository should be able to collect approving signatures and do a bulk upload him/herself. -- Sam.

I suspect the current population of scientists will need us to step in and perform all the roles of a journal publisher, thus allowing them to continue their workflow completely without any change to their own scientific work. If we're going to capture science publishing, we have to be MORE accommodating than the for-profit journals. So if a scientist's existing "upload" process is to just send it as an email attachment, or even god forbid to print it up and mail it to somebody, we need to be able to accommodate that with all the ease-of-use that their existing provider gives them. Essentially, we need to steal somebody who runs one of the existing scientific journal companies (or one of their free alternatives) and get them to teach us and our computers how to do everything the professional journal companies are doing-- so that the scientists can then be free to just "swap" out their commercial publisher and switch straight to us without ANY changes. Alec

At the very least we should evangalise publishers such as this as a great place to look for specialist sources (for Wikipedia etc.); often I find myself limited to using paid-access sources and I always feel frustrated by this. Free and open journals are awesome, and any opportunity to make use of them should be encouraged. Tom

On 07/12/11 11:16 AM, Samuel Klein wrote: I don't really object to hosting the kinds of papers under discussion, but at what point does the pursuit of such content become a monopolistic practice. Others should be hosting these too, even if it results in duplication and redundancy. We should even be encouraging researchers to publish elsewhere.first. To have that happen there needs to be more clarity in the reliable financing of open access sites in general. There are consequences to being the big kid on the block. Rather than merely reflecting trends and attitudes we begin to lead them. With something as simple as alternative spellings, when we adopt the most common spelling based on our own quantitative analysis of Google usages we affect the future analysis by others because their analyses will include usages by Wikimedia and by those influenced by Wikimedia. Other natural processes which may have favoured the alternative are thwarted in their evolution. Ray

2011/7/18 Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; I agree that 5 minutes are an acceptable time: what I wanted to say (probably my English is worse than what I think :-) is that "curation" of a thesis on Wikisource doesn't take 5 minutes, but even 5 hours. 5 hours and a lot of knowledge in Wikisource policies, mediawiki, templates and so on. I perfectly know that having your own thesis in wikitext on Wikisource is a good thing, but I don't honestly know if it is worth the labor. Aubrey

Vaguely related: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-charged-with-dat… Aaron Swartz charged by federal prosecutors with illegally downloading over 4 million journal articles from JSTOR, with the intent to redistribute them via file-sharing networks.

2011/7/19 David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; 1. Openly support the OA movement, partecipating in conferences, making public statements, addressing the issue to the community. We discuss with them on the "interoperability" of the our movements, as to say we tell them using clear licenses (CC-BY) is *fundamental*. 2. Discuss about a technical framework for publicize OA papers in Wikipedia. Couldn't we harvest OA articles from institutional and subject repositories, and even from OA journals, covering both green and Gold Open access? Couldn't we show dynamic lists of OA articles in the Reference sections of our Wikipedia articles, generated by keyword and language? All OA articles have these metadata in Dublin Core, it would be easy to filter them and create those dynamic lists. (I'm not sure about a Wikipedia policy on "preferring" OA sources, it could conflict something else) We could even bulk upload every article we find that is in CC-BY on Commons, to store it there (and when we find a solution for uploading them on Wikisource, we should do it too)(yes, we should need a metadata/OAI-PMH framework for us, but I don't think is such a big deal). (these are just ideas, feel free to dump them :-) Aubrey

On 19 July 2011 21:48, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Demand Progress seem to be fairly clear that JSTOR were not the driving force behind the prosecution, and I'd hope they'd know! http://demandprogress.org/aaron "...JSTOR has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute." (I have always vaguely wondered how many cases like this there are - a slapped wrist and request not to do it again by the publishers. You'd think there'd be a couple of dozen cases every year, though I guess by their nature it's quite discreet.) But in more general terms, why do you specifically feel JSTOR are a problem needing dealt with? They do a lot of things right with their repository that more conventional academic publishers often do badly, in my experience. (In no particular order: retroactive access for withdrawn journals; on-site access; corpus research data; subsidised access in the developing world; transparent pricing; etc, etc.) The basic issue of gated access to scholarly research, yes, that's an issue. But it's a pretty fundamental issue to the sector - it's tied up with the whole business model of how we publish academic work - not a quirk of this one organisation for which they specifically need punished. Are there some particularly egregious bits of past behaviour I've missed? -- - Andrew Gray   andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 07/07/11 12:00 AM, Ting Chen wrote: This is, of course, excessive. On the one hand it is a continuing virtue to have reliable proofread texts, but it should be sufficient to be able to link to such a text somewhere without necessarily including a copy. Whether one, two or three people have verified a text can indeed be shown in the metadata, and that becomes a basis for a user to judge reliability. Imposing stringent requirements will also discourage having other editions of the same work. The one place where we can provide the greatest value-added is in linking the material in ways that it will become useful. Ray

On 07/21/11 8:19 AM, David Gerard wrote: There's a tiny handful of these in Wikisource. ... It's a lot of work. Ray

Actually, http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/individuals/early-journal-content Although the terms and conditions are somewhat restrictive. Fred