Hi everyone,

Last year we asked for feedback about a large literature review we are currently conducting on peer-reviewed studies on Wikipedia. We thank everyone who gave us comments and pointers, and we have carefully listened to everything. We're glad to mention that we've joined forces with Finn Årup Nielsen, and so we'll be fully merging our review into his (his latest working paper is available at
http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/edoc_download.php/6012/pdf/imm6012.pdf).

In the next week or so we expect to release the main dataset of our extraction to a public SMW wiki for comments and feedback before we proceed with further analysis. However, we have two questions to clarify about how to release our data. I'll be posting them in two distinct threads for more organized responses. Here I'll ask a question about posting published abstracts, and in a separate posting I'll ask about license.

We would really love to put up all the abstracts of the articles that we post (and indeed have already done so on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ACST), but I recently encountered the following article which basically argues that mass posting of abstracts is not justifiable as fair use, at least in the context of Wikipedia:
http://journalology.blogspot.com/2010/05/why-you-cant-copy-abstracts-into.html

We don't think this argument necessarily applies to websites that list abstracts (for example, PubMed and Medeley published thousands of abstracts), but we would really liketo hear the community's comments on whether posting copyrighted abstracts (in our case, over 400) generally qualifies as fair use.

Regards,
Chitu
For the Wikilit project team: Arto Lanamäki, Mohamad Mehdi, Mostafa Mesgari, Finn Årup Nielsen, Chitu Okoli