[Foundation-l] Journal Boycott

[Daniel Mietchen]

I think that skipping non-OA sources is not a valid option, though
encouragement of the use of relevant OA sources is.

One way to achieve that could be by highlighting the "OA-ness" of
cited references, as is now common practice in the Research section of
the Signpost (most recent example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-01-30/Recent_research#References
).

So far, this flagging is done manually, but at least for publishers
that use the same Creative Commons license for all the articles they
publish, it would be easy to modify citation templates like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_journal to include the OA
icon for all DOIs belonging to the prefixes listed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/Open_Knowledge_Foundation_Germany/Open_Access_Catalogue/OA_publishers/DOI_prefixes_entirely_OA
. Things get a bit more complicated on the journal level, especially
in the case of hybrid OA journals, in which some articles are OA,
others not, and even the OA ones may be under different licenses.

What else can we do? Well, the usual stuff: assessing and improving
existing articles around OA and starting new ones, or putting OA
materials to new uses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access
has recently been started with precisely these goals.

We can also highlight content that we reuse from OA sources, as per
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Open_Access_File_of_the_Day
, or we can see to OA-related topics or files being more
systematically considered for the various options of featuring.

As for any other article, the entries on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier
should strive to neutrally state the facts - they speak for
themselves. That said, I am certainly supportive of closer interaction
between the OA and Wikimedia communities - not by chance one of the
core aspects of my Wikimedian in Residence project (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedian_in_Residence_on_Open_Science
).

Such interaction can take place in multiple ways, e.g. via an
Open-Access policy of the Foundation (currently being developed by
RCOM at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Areas_of_interest/Open-access_policy
),  via removal of weasel words in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Criticism ,
via collaboration with scholarly journals (e.g. as per
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/January_2012/Contents/Open_Access_report#Topic_Pages_at_PLoS_Computational_Biology
),
via translation of OA-related articles (cf.
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/January_2012/Contents/Tool_testing_report#Documentation_of_DYKs_and_other_temporarily_featured_content
), or by mutually showcasing OA an wiki matters at wiki and OA events
(e.g. as per
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-01-30/Recent_research#Briefly
or
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedian_in_Residence_on_Open_Science/Events
) .

With regards to boycotting Elsevier, I do not think that would easily
fall within the mission of the Foundation (or even individual
chapters), but of course, individual Wikimedians are free to join.

I haven't joined the anti-Elsevier pledge and have no intention to do
so anytime soon, for two main reasons:
- Elsevier is neither the only nor the fiercest opponent of Open
Access, just the biggest one
- I have already signed a (rather moderate) Open Access pledge last year (cf.
http://www.openaccesspledge.com/?page_id=2 ) and a more strict one
last month (cf. http://www.researchwithoutwalls.org/451 ). In both
cases, it applies to all non-OA publishing rather than just one
publisher, and in the latter case, I specifically mention
compatibility with reuse on Wikipedia as a criterion for me to get
involved.

Stressing the reuse aspects of OA is an area that I can well imagine
being championed by the Wikimedia community or by the Foundation: Much
of Gold OA is reusable on Wikipedia (e.g. all PLoS or Hindawi journals
but not Nature Communications or Scientific Reports, nor Living
Reviews or Scholarpedia), some of Green OA (e.g. all of Nature
Precedings, some of arXive, though not visibly so) and basically
nothing of traditionally published materials (exceptions being the odd
human genome paper released directly into the Public Domain).

It is thus not surprinsing to see that a ranking of publishers by
number of pages on Wikimedia Commons that mention one of their DOIs
sees several OA publishers ahead of Elsevier and other large non-OA
publishers (cf. http://toolserver.org/~dartar/cite-o-meter/?commons=1
; prototype; loads slowly and is not entirely up to date). I am
involved in work on a tool that automatically uploads to Commons audio
and video files from suitably licensed OA articles (cf.
http://wir.okfn.org/2012/01/18/project-introduction-open-access-media-importer-for-wikimedia-commons/
).

OA publishers - namely PLoS - have been pushing the idea of openly
tracking the reuse of scholarly materials (cf.
http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/ ), and on-wiki reuse is one of
the components of interest currently being worked on (cf.
http://total-impact.org/collection/MqAnvI ).


Daniel

--
http://www.google.com/profiles/daniel.mietchen



On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 12:30 AM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1 February 2012 20:14, Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>
>> Coulw we start a WikiJournal of some sort?
>
> Been floated from time to time thus not going to happen
>
>> (Akin to WikiNews in
>> operation, perhaps?)
>
> No. If were actually going to launch a journal we would do it in a
> conventional manner. Partly so wikipedia will view it as a reliable
> source and partly because in some way wikinews acts as a terrible
> warning.
>
> --
> geni
>
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