Hi Yana,

To build on Daniel's comment re inclusion of OA in Wikimania this year, Jimmy spoke on an OA panel Daniel and I participated in. Jimmy gave four great reasons as to why OA is important to Wikimedia. Unfortunately, I was chairing the session, and didn't write them all down, but perhaps Daniel remembers, as Jimmy framed his talk very well. I believe three of them were:

OA is important to Wikimedia as it provides access to research in:
- developing countries
- everyone with Jack Andraka as an example
- the OA scholarly research which is made available which can be used to develop WMF projects

Cheers,
Melissa Hagemann

-----Original Message-----
From: openaccess-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:openaccess-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Mietchen
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2014 12:42 AM
To: Open Access discussions
Subject: Re: [OpenAccess] Blog post on Open Access

 Thanks, Yana. Comments inline.

On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 2:52 AM, Yana Welinder <ywelinder@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> We are doing a guest blog post on open access for EFF next week.
Cool!

>
> Free as in Open Access and Wikipedia
>
>
> Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites are closely connected to open
> access ideals
"ideals" has a bit too much of a romantic connotation here. Something like "goals" would be better, I think.

> 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,
- the video linked there is licensed -NC-ND (as displayed shortly before the end, and contrary to the CC BY indicated in the metadata), so I would not link to it.
- "true" in such contexts is also problematic, especially near non-open licenses and considering that open access refers only to access to (some of the) final outputs of research, rather than all outputs and the entire process.

> we will move closer to "a world in which every single human being can
> freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
>
>
> 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. 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
I don't think that "set up" should be linked, and the link currently in there is not a good fit anyway (it would fit better to the "importance of open access to Wikipedia" phrase above or the "closely connected" one from the introductory sentence, or the "reciprocal relationship" below).

> a WikiProject Open Access to
> improve open access-related articles on Wikipedia
and to increase the reuse of open-access materials on Wikimedia platforms more generally, e.g. as per http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Open_Access_Media_Importer_Bot
or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access/Signalling_OA-ness
.
For an overview of activities, see the monthly reports at https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:This_Month_in_GLAM_Open_Access_reports
.

> and create an Open Access
> Policy for research projects with the support of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Those were not the goals of the creation of the WikiProject, and the policy - which is still in draft stage, by the way - has not received support from the Foundation, and that link is to a page that is misleading in the context of this blog post, as it only clarifies the meaning of the term "significant support" for the purposes of that draft policy.

> 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
> ideas or facts that are not supported by reliable and published
> sources. Wikipedia has tremendous power as a platform for relaying the
> outcomes of academic study by leading over 400 million monthly
> visitors 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.
Here, it would be appropriate to mention the Open Access Reader project:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Access_Reader .

> In light of this, we are thrilled to see Generation Open blooming.
Not sure what you see blooming here.

> The
> Digital Commons Network now boasts 1,109,355 works from 358 institutions.
Most of these are actually not openly licensed.

> The Directory of Open Access Journals further has over 10,035 journals
"over 10,000" would be more appropriate.

> from 135 countries.
>
> Esteemed law journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and
> Technology, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and Michigan Law Review
> subscribe to the Open Access Law Program, which encourages them to
> archive their articles under open access principles.
These journals archive their content under free-to-read principles, with limited options for reuse. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Open_Access_Initiative#Definition_of_open_access
.

> Wikipedians are also contributing to the body of published open access
> scholarship. Earlier this month, four Wikipedians published an article
> on Dengue fever in Open Medicine (an open access and peer-reviewed
> journal) based on a Wikipedia article that was collaboratively edited
> by 1,369
"over 1,300" may be better here

> 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.
Yes.

It is worth mentioning that many more Wikipedia articles already incorporate text from openly licensed scholarly articles (cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_articles_incorporating_text_from_open_access_publications
) and that a subset thereof (cf.
http://topicpages.ploscompbiol.org/wiki/Category:PLoS_Computational_Biology_articles)
have actually been written by scholars for that purpose and published in a peer-reviewed journal.

> 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 and on different devices.
Yup. Perhaps worth mentioning that there was an entire Wikimania track devoted to Open Scholarship this year (with a focus on Open Access; https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Scholarship ) and that Wikimedia-related talks have been given at Open Access meetings (e.g.
http://river-valley.zeeba.tv/transparency-in-measures-of-scientific-impact/
or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Talks/COASP_2014
).

Last but not least, Open Access Week has a Wikidata item (
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2000002 ) and that Wikimedians have actively participated in it in the past (e.g.
https://p2pu.org/en/groups/open-access-wikipedia-challenge/ ).

Looking forward to the next version of your post, Daniel

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