Hi Yana,
Thanks for taking on this important topic.
I think is really important to emphasis the the unrestricted use aspect of
open access. I see freely available to read confused with true open access.
In my conversations with people who are in health care research, I find
that today they are mostly all in favor of open access in the sense it is
available for free. Even eager to see it happen for their own research.
But it being published with in way that gives permission for unrestricted
reuse is not seen as being nearly as important.
Often, I think it is an oversight and they have not completely thought
through the meaning of open access when it is presented to them as only
being freely available to read.
So, it would be good to emphasis why being able to freely reuse is an
important part of true open access. And not let the meaning of the term get
diluted by publishers who will give quick access to view articles if
researcher pay a premium for it, but still want to control the material
long tern.
Hope that makes sense. :-)
Sydney Poore
User:FloNight
Wikipedian in Residence
at Cochrane Collaboration
On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 8:52 PM, Yana Welinder <ywelinder(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hi all,
We are doing a guest blog post on open access for EFF next week. I would
very much appreciate your thoughts on it and in particular the section that
discusses WikiProject Open Access.
Best,
Yana
Free as in Open Access and Wikipedia
Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites are closely connected to open
access ideals 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
<http://youtu.be/8hxKH3-42U0>, we will move closer to "a world in which
every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision>."
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.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources> 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
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/01/15/wikimedia-and-open-access/> a WikiProject
Open Access
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access> to
improve open access-related articles on Wikipedia and create an Open
Access Policy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Areas_of_interest/Open-access_policy>
for research projects with the support
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Areas_of_interest/Significant_support>
of the Wikimedia Foundation.
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
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research> ideas or
facts that are not supported by reliable and published sources
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Sources>.
Wikipedia has tremendous power as a platform for relaying the outcomes of
academic study
<http://columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2014/10/13/sharing-wikipedia> by
leading over 400 million monthly visitors <http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/>
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.
In light of this, we are thrilled to see Generation Open blooming. The Digital
Commons Network <http://network.bepress.com/> now boasts 1,109,355 works
from 358 institutions. The Directory of Open Access Journals
<http://doaj.org/> further has over 10,035 journals from 135 countries.
Esteemed law journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology
<http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/>, Berkeley Technology Law Journal
<http://btlj.org/>, and Michigan Law Review
<http://www.michiganlawreview.org/> subscribe to the Open Access Law
Program <https://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/5464>, which
encourages them to archive their articles under open access principles.
Wikipedians are also contributing to the body of published open access
scholarship. Earlier this month, four Wikipedians published an article on
Dengue fever <http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/viewFile/562/564> in Open
Medicine <http://www.openmedicine.ca/> (an open access and peer-reviewed
journal) based on a Wikipedia article
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever#External_links>that was collaboratively
edited
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dengue_fever&offset=&limit=500&action=history>
by 1,369 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.
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
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero> and on different
devices
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/17/carry-the-entirety-of-wikipedia-in-your-pocket-with-kiwix-for-android/>.
--
Yana Welinder
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6867
@yanatweets <https://twitter.com/yanatweets>
NOTICE: This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you
have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the
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on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.
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