Sorry Dario, you need to look at it from the editors' and scholarls point of view and not say you are thinking of the "taxpayer"--journal prices have gone up but taxes have gone down, so that's not a real issue. I've been on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals & all would be in real trouble on free access. Who would pay their bills? Who would pay their grad students? Already they are threatened by declining university budgets and losing the subscription base would be a terrific blow. "Access for the "taxpayers" / "taxpayers pay twice" is a rhetorical tool designed to defund science. It is the professors and graduate students who need the journals and who would be hurt when they close. Richard Jensen At 11:45 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:

Richard, I don't want to take over the thread to push a personal opinion, the purpose of my mail was to share an important petition that I believe many on this list should be aware of. Since you mention "editors and scholars" and the purpose of "paid subscriptions", though, let me add a short note. I don't know about you, but as reviewers and editors most of us do editorial work as a service to the profession: we don't get paid by publishers, we are not subsidized by journal subscriptions. The (closed-access) journals I've been involved with as editorial board member are not threatened by open access: if anything they are threatened by the unsustainable fees that the publisher charges universities and consortia. Academia (that is, authors, reviewers, editors, students) is not supported by journals fees (it would be awesome if it were), publishers are, and in my opinion it's about time to change this. Dario On May 20, 2012, at 11:01 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:

Some regular journals charge to make an article open access. It is their approach to open access. Other models exist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:

sorry a typo here: (in the first paragraph) adopting "non-"free versus open access On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Han-Teng Liao <hanteng(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Piotr's evaluation is very much in tone with what happens in Brazil, where all journals are open access. For journal publishing tools, most journals here use the Public Knowledge Project: http://pkp.sfu.ca/. I would also refer to you the SCIELO project (again?): http://www.scielo.org/php/index.php. Indeed, costs would include revising, copydesk and page design - usually covered here by a grant for a graduate student. Juliana. -- Profa. Dra. Juliana Bastos Marques Departamento de História - CCH/UNIRIO http://historiaunirio.com.br/ http://www.historiaunirio.com.br/numem/pesquisadores/julianamarques/ http://www.domusaurea.org/ On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl> wrote:

what I find concerning is the sentiment expressed in the original email: "a petition you should care about," esp. where "care about" seems to mean, "will want to sign." my understanding is that wiki-research-l is about research into and about how the wikis work. it is not, as far as I know, a platform for political endorsements, especially for ones not directly related to wikimedia (which this is not). the petition takes a political position about an issue not directly related to the wikis, although i do not deny that it may be of interest to wikipedians--but so are many things. is it not possible that some of us on this list might have a different take on the underlying issue, and that while we might also care about the topic that is raised, we may not actually endorse the position taken by the petition, and our reluctance might actually be considered and genuine? (as a matter of fact, in this case, I think I do support the petition, but its use of vague and categorical language makes me hesitant to sign it. the NIH policy you reference and which i do endorse includes at least two provisions not clearly indicated in the current petition: [1] the NIH policy specifically and exclusively refers to principal investigators and the institutions of *direct NIH-funded research*, a much narrower category than whatever is meant by "taxpayer-funded research"; [2] the NIH policy requires copies of publications to be deposited in a central free repository [PubMed], but does not comment on the existence of non-open source publication venues. this petition asks for "free access over the internet," which does not sound like the same thing as PubMed, even if that's what's meant; it sounds like it *might *mean "no more journals that charge for access," which in my opinion is an explosive request that attacks the livelihoods of many people of good faith.) The NIH policy, for reference: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm. given the recent and in my opinion unwarranted and misguided attack on the nonprofit journal aggregator JSTOR on this list (somewhat retracted by the person who made the original comments, including the strange assertion that "we"--presumably readers of this list and contributors to wikipedia--"are unaffiliated scholars"), I would hope some care would be taken in approaching this matter in particular. some of us are academics and some of us do not, apparently, see it is as transparently obvious that all our work product should be available absolutely for free. (although i wholeheartedly endorse the widespread creation in US colleges and universities of institutional repositories wherein all professorial research is made available for free to anyone; i make all of my work available this way and have for over a decade, and I believe this kind of policy is rapidly becoming the rule here). i honestly don't see what the petition has to do with wiki-research-l, but at the very least, an acknowledgement that the rest of the list readers are intelligent human beings, perhaps some of us even working academics, who may want to read the material and make up our own minds would strike me as indicating the respect you ask Richard Jensen to display. one of Richard Jensen's earlier postings was about ways to get more working academics to participate in Wikipedia, which i do see as an ongoing issue of real concern. i did not see a big outpouring of support for his desire on this list, which worries me. I see signs of persistent assumptions that we do not read this list and are not part of the community, and I include the wording of the original post in this--since among other things, this petition is a direct request for the government to intervene in the working relationship between academic scientists and their publishers, and this list is run by neither academic scientists nor publishers and does not generally discuss policy issues regarding their conduct. Such assumptions do not inspire me to contribute more, or to encourage my colleagues to do so. I hope these assumptions are not widespread and I hope we are welcome to be part of the community. On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 1:45 AM, Dario Taraborelli < dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: -- David Golumbia dgolumbia(a)gmail.com

Peer review is not working very well as it is. If you want to fix peer review, redirect a fraction of the current journal profits to actually pay reviewers (if only - for the timely reviews). Piotr, who currently has one article waiting for a reviewer for 13 months, and another, for 11. Sigh. -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski On 5/21/2012 1:30 AM, Richard Jensen wrote:

Cannot resist the comedic irony I just think of. "Tear down this pay wall, or otherwise I will buy a cheap access acount from Taobao!" On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 11:28 PM, Benj. Mako Hill &lt;mako(a)mit.edu&gt; wrote:

On 5/22/2012 6:55 PM, FT2 wrote: Tradition / organizational inertia / vested interests who are making billions of $ in the current model (yes, billions!*) "In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of $3.2 billion." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/researchers-boycott-elsevier-jour… -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski

Thank you for clarifying the issue, I was not aware of the existence of the non-profit non-open content journals. Their existence is certainly not a crime, and people who help out with them are to be commended; I am certainly not endorsing any attack on them (nor am I seeing any here...). With regards to US funding of education, speaking from personal experience, I hear my collegues at the University of Pittsburgh complain a lot about how they are being affected (negatively) through recent cuts in government funding. How much that can be generalized, I frankly don't have time to research right now, but I am pretty sure that not an insignificant portion of paychecks that Pitt's professors are drawing comes from the taxes on US citizens. Given that, I do find it a problem that their work may be locked behind a paywall, be it for-profit or not. The main argument in criticizing such non-profits, as far as I understand it, is idealistic: society (scholars, Wikipedians, etc.) would benefit if all research would be free. Locking it behind a paywall drains resources that could be invested in other pursuits, and limits the content only to those who can afford it (a portion of scholars in rich countries). Now, here's a more constructive (if very theoretical) proposal to consider. Let's assume that a non-profit journal like ''The Journal of American History'' needs to put its content behind a paywall to generate enough $ to stay afloat, in addition to the funds received from the university (although I am a bit confused here, Richard mentined that the staff is paid by the university, so what are the funds for? Office rental?). Anyway, the funds the journal receives come either from the university, or (through some intermediaries) from various other universities (their libraries). It stands to reason that a more efficient way to distribute the funds would be to direct them straight to the journal, obtaining savings (no need for intermediaries), and at the same time allow the journal to operate as an open content one. In other words, in this model the journals are distributed free, and sustained by the money that currently is given to the libraries to buy them. To sum it up, what some people are criticizing, I believe, is the assumption that the we cannot reform the current model to end up with one where the journal content is freely available online. This can be done, just like many other free things were created in cyberspace (Linux, Wikipedia, many open content journals...). -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski On 5/22/2012 8:29 PM, David Golumbia wrote:

No, the Organization of American Historians (the sponsor) has its own entirely separate office down the street. The organization budget about breaks even every year--there is no "cash cow." In addition to the Journal of American History there are over 1000 smaller scholarly history journals in the U.S., typically sponsored by academic history departments or historical societies. Of the several dozen i know about, all of them are edited and vetted by paid professionals. Probably many of the smallest ones are local affairs that are indeed operated by volunteers and cater to a local audience. What's relevant to Wikipedia is that Wiki editors are not allowed to do original research. We are required to base our articles on published reliable secondary sources. In history we do not do very well -- Wikipedia is good at military history, mediocre at political history and poor at social & cultural history. Despite the bitter feelings that are obvious among the Wikipedians here toward academe, that Wikipedia depends upon paid professionals for its material. -- I am referring of course not to the thousands of Wiki articles on video game or TV characters but to the serious material that bears resemblance to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Better yet, compare Wiki with the hundreds of other academic encyclopedias that you can find in university libraries. The quality of content of those paper history encyclopedias, in my professional judgment, is significantly better than Wikipedia. Richard Jensen

Sadly I think this discussion demonstrates some hostility toward academe. (here's a quote from yesterday addressed to me on this list: "...knowledge robberbarons standing athwart history imagining they and their institutions alone, had the requisite skills and expertise to engage in knowledge production. Until they didn't. Enjoy your new neighbors in trash heap of history." I would code his emotional tone as "hostile") Well it's always nice to see people citing the lessons of history, especially since I'm a specialist in that sort of OR. But the underlying hostility is a problem that bothers me a lot and I have been trying to think of ways to bridge the gap. There is in operation a Wikimedia Foundation Education program that is small and will not, in my opinion, scale up easily to the size needed. In any case the Foundation plans to cut the US-Canada program loose in 12 months to go its own way. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/Wikimedia_Fo… My own thinking is currently along two lines: a) set up a highly visible Wiki prsence at scholarly conventions (in multiple disciplines) with 1) Wiki people at booths to explain the secrets of Wikipedia to interested academics and 2) hands-on workshops to show professors how to integrate student projects into their classes. (and yes, professors given paid time off to attend these conventions, often plus travel money.) b) run a training program for experienced Wiki editors at a major research library. (I'm thinking just of Wiki history editors here.) For those who want it provide access to sources like JSTOR. Bring in historians covering main historiographical themes. I think this could help hundreds of editors find new topics, methods and sources that would lead to hundreds of thousands of better edits. Richard Jensen

Hi Richard. Well, it is true that this mismatch exists, mainly due to a different culture clash (academia vs. open distributed production of knowledge). I wouldn't characterize this as a problem exclusive to Wikipedia. In fact, it affects all communities that follow the commons-based peer production paradigm. Adaption will be progressive, and not very fast, since academia has been following its current procedures since decades ago. Perhaps the huge success of Wikipedia, and the fact that it was adopted by millions of persons around the world at a very fast pace may introduce some bias in our perception of what is 'scaling up' effectively. For sure, there are thousands of universities and it might not be very realistic to think that 90% of faculties will happily integrate Wikipedia editing in their classes next year. Moreover, there are additional factors that, depending on the case, can make it a bit difficult to succeed in this endeavour (for instance, I'm thinking about "conflicts of interest" created by students that will be evaluated, struggling to introduce content and hard-working wikipedians trying to maintain articles in good shape). However, the undeniable truth is that Wikipedia has now become a commodity for 99% of students (and scholars) today. We will have to learn how to help each other to use our resources in mutual benefit. That said, I suspect that discontinuing this support in USA and Canada is not linked to either a lack of interest from WMF in this area, or a low level of success of this program. Funding is limited, and now enough start-up materials have been produced and many people (ambassador/students/faculties) have been trained in different univerisities. The next logical step, I would say, would be to let them act as the new broadcast points for others, so that there is any opportunity for the system to scale up (even if slowly). A centralized model could never attain the same capillarity. That is true, and it is something that the program is already doing in different countries. As I said, there is a huge interest from many scholars. Just as an example, faculties attending the last seminar I gave at University of Salamanca ('Workshop on Wikipedia editing') sold out free seats within the first 24 hours after the initial announcement. Most of attendees came from the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting. There were also some librarians. For some of them, it was their first contact with Wikipedia editing. This is definitely a very nice suggestion. I concur in that it could be a way to nurture the knowledge stream in the other direction (academia --> Wikipedia). Nevertheless, I still think that wikipedians will tend to favor open access references, in the same way that (willfully or not) people favor the open access Wikipedia on their web pages boosting these links to the top of results from search engines. On top of that, not anyone have access to certain references, since they do not have access to digital resources in university libraries or they do not have public libraries that pay access fees for those references. Perhaps this could be another opportunity for effort distribution, given that many quality references are not going to be freely accessible in the mid-term. Cheers, Felipe.

Hi Richard, you queried in a previous posting whether relations between Academia and Wikipedians were better in the UK. But I suspect that no-one is truly in a position to answer that. In both the US and the UK the situation will be complex, some Academics are Wikipedians, some Academics judge us by the quality we'd achieved by 2006 and really need to check again and reassess the project. Some Academics respect and value us for the way we try to teach today's kids not to cut and paste. Others despair at us as the source of much of the plagiarism they receive from students. Of course this is a very different issue to the debate about Open source freely available journals, a debate where some people on this list have strongly held and diametrically opposed views. Wikipedia is a Tertiary source not a Primary or Secondary one and cannot exist without those primary and secondary sources. So their continued health matters to us, but clearly there is a divide as to how that continued health is to be achieved, and indeed defined. Wikimedia is itself very much a part of the open source movement, but that doesn't mean that all Wikimedians believe that everything should be open source. As for your two suggestions about attending scholarly conferences and working with libraries, there has been a different emphasis between the US and the UK in the last couple of years. Here in the UK we have prioritised outreach to GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), whilst the US prioritised Universities. That seems to be shifting, with the UK expanding its education links: < http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/EduWiki_Conference_2012> <http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_strategy> Whilst the US is now expanding its GLAM program. I have participated in editathons we've had in the UK at both the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, I didn't take part in the British library one, but I gather it was a success. I think that would count as one of your "training program for experienced Wiki editors at a major research library". The sort of articles coming out of these collaborations include http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoxne_hoard WSC On 23 May 2012 05:30, Richard Jensen &lt;rjensen(a)uic.edu&gt; wrote:

The cited comment might have been a bit over the top, although Brian explains it in this thread. I do have to agree with others that I have not seen much if any of this hostility on Wikipedia, and even the discussion here seems a good illustration that such hostility is rare and rather good faithed. I have seen once an academic collegue I respect a lot leave Wikipedia after (he has done few edits) having been accused of spamming (he was linking the same academic article on too many pages). The editor who warned him was too blunt, my collegue was too annoyed with a simple message and overreacted along the lines "so I am not welcome here - goodbye", sad but happens. It was, however, the only time I can recall that I've seen an academic leave this project. I'd say that the problem in academia-Wikipedia relation is that there are too few academics editing it, and this is because for most of them (us...) editing Wikipedia does nothing for our job careers. I am a sociologist, and I've written dozen of sociology related DYKs, several Good Articles and one or two Featured ones on subjects of core importance to my discipline, useful for educating public and teaching students (my Good/Featured Articles are bios of sociologists that are present in all books used for teaching "Sociological Theory" and similar courses). Eventually I feel confident I could bring enough of such bios to Good/Featured article that they would replace the books we currently use, contributing to the open textbook movement. But such work is not recognized by the academia, and my job chances are hurt because when I write an article for Wikipedia, which are freely read by thousands people a day (http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Karl_Marx is probably my most popular one) I am not writing an article that would be published in a traditional, peer-reviewed and most likely pay-walled journal, read by a tiny faction of readers that read what I write for Wikipedia - but it is such article that my colleagues care, not Wikipedia ones. I like to think that my contributions to Wikipedia are helpful for my discipline, providing free education to students and other knowledge seekers, but I know that they are next to worthless on my CV. And when I talk to my colleagues, be they grad students or veteran professors, I get the same reply time and again about why they think Wikipedia is cool but they don't contribute to it: "it does nothing for my CV/job prospects/tenure review; I have a journal article/book chapter to write/conference to prepare for, so I have no time to write for Wikipedia". If we want to encourage cooperation between academia and Wikipedia, we have to make it worthwhile for academics to contribute to Wikipedia - worthwhile in terms of their careers. One of the ways to do so would be to have professional organizations for our respective professions institute an award for popularization of the respective discipline on Wikipedia. Till that happens, and till we start treating Wikipedia contributions on par with publishing in peer reviewed publications, the collaboration between Wikipedia and academia will be an exception than the rule, not because of some hostility, but because in the world of cash economics (as some have reminded me), we cannot afford to contribute much to a utopian project that does not pay back, neither in $ nor in professional reputation. -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski On 5/23/2012 12:30 AM, Richard Jensen wrote:

Hi Piotr, hi all, Piotr, I like your idea about instituting awards because awards may help younger researchers in particular to try something new that their bosses are not likely to have tried out by themselves, e.g. contributing scientific or otherwise research-related stuff to Wikipedia in my opinion, any idea that helps academics accept open science more wholeheartedly will in the long run benefit Wikipedia and the wikification of scientific publishing On Wed, 23 May 2012 17:48:27 -0400, Piotr Konieczny wrote [...] let me illustrate this by an example: two words in your post ("for our respective professions" and "award") made me think I might point you to a contest for a scientific award that is currently running, until 31 May which is hosted by an open access journal in Leukemia research et al. (Cellular Therapy and Transplantation, http://www.ctt-journal.com) the contest's first phase was run in a discussion forum on the journal's site with a subsequent traditional upload of papers to be reviewed by a Jury (whose names were publicized in advance), with the best six papers to be published in that journal afterwards phase II of the contest is run in a blog, with the blog comments being potentially rewardable (by a prize in money, by votes etc.) and each comment getting its own doi http://maximowaward.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/blog-comment-contest-10-31-may… terminology/ the organizers think that such a contest is likely to be the first step for researchers in this field to use Web 2.0 for scientiific purposes and in an open science frame. the next step would be to invite potential authors of this journal to contribute articles in the format of Topic Pages that could easily be "wikified" (thanks to Daniel's initiative, see e.g. his recent mail http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2012-May/002124.html) Q: does anyone know of similar initiatives in medicine or other fields that might help speed up some kind of habit change and maybe enhance new practices among researchers that get them closer to Wikipedia? or maybe of some specific criticism of any award in this regard? thanks & cheers, Claudia koltzenburg(a)w4w.net