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>.