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, 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 a WikiProject Open Access to improve open access-related articles on Wikipedia and create an Open Access Policy for research projects with the 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 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.
In light of this, we are thrilled to see Generation Open blooming. The Digital Commons Network now boasts 1,109,355 works from 358 institutions. The Directory of Open Access Journals further has over 10,035 journals 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.
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 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 and on different devices.