I doubt that most conventional publishers will permit the Foundation to re-sell their articles at anything less than their own list price, which is often as high as $40 per article. (that's what this amounts to) -- or for a flat rate to provide access to anyone who gets a Wikipedia account.

I did some preliminary inquires a year ago, with not very enthusiastic publisher response, but could follow up now--I think we're much more visible. Based on request I get to help out, and on observed editing and some user pages, I don't think it's remotely true, even in many science fields, that most of our editors have access to university libraries. Nor do I think that most of our content editors are administrators; conversely, of the 1100 active admins, perhaps half are active editors. Perhaps we should think on the basis of active editors over say 500 mainspace edits. This should significantly reassure the publishers. How many people is that? In my experience as an ejournal negotiator, starting from the first days of ejournals. publishers are not very willing to reduce significantly below published rate schedules, and we might do better asking for it as a donation. . But both could be tried. Most publishers have flat rates, in science averaging $1000 per journal, much less in the humanities. -- but there are a great many titles. some go by size--& for this we're unique in terms of subscriber base & its hard to predict what they'd estimate. Let's take JSTOR--remember, its backfiles only, typically without the most recent 5 yrs. If one wants the most recent 5 yrs, one goes to the publisher & pays by title. Very very roughly, rates for the JStor portion can be $500/yr for a small public library to $50,000 for a university, depending of where they class the institution & how many titles. If the foundation would like me to approach them, someone should email me offline. In science, I think some of the scientific societies will donate & the way to go is for some member to inquire Remember that all US NIH & UK MRC papers will be available free from 08+ after a 6 month delay through pubmedcentral. There are of course great many other possibilities, but all the relatively inexpensive ones involve backfiles only. At the going rates, figure about $1000 per journal in science--less in other subjects for academic journals. I doubt we'll get discounts, and I think we'll do better to ask for it as a donation. I've made preliminary inquiries in the past, and not gotten very far. But maybe it is time to try gain. The publisher I think this would really make sense for in terms of things like BLP is the NYTimes blocked years, but essentially all public libraries should have them. As for JSTOR, this is perhaps a possibility as a special case. I can make the contact. T On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 7:35 PM, Alec Conroy <alecmconroy(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

We need to get someone who's more of a professional librarian to look at this and comment. What are typical university library online reference access budgets like, for example? Phoebe? -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

I comment as a professional academic librarian. I was the cochair of princeton's collection development committee on electronic resources from the day it started. The typical budget today for e-resources for a major university is on the order of three to six million dollars a year, mainly for science journals and databases. The most expensive subscriptions to the works of a single publisher can be over one million dollars, and there are individual databases in the fifty to one hundred-thousand dollar range. A typical budget for a good undergraduate college might be one million; it will not have the most expensive journals. On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 12:11 AM, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:

2008/12/23 Wilhelm Schnotz <wilhelm(a)nixeagle.org>rg>: We've discussed this before, in a general case, and pretty much dismissed it. Limiting ourselves to easily-accessible sources sounds good in practice, but immediately runs into trouble. We simply can't write articles on most of our subjects to a good and reliable standard without relying heavily on access to print books (which people object to because they're offline) or subscription databases (which people object to because they're not accessible to casual users). (This should be distinguished from, eg, people sourcing things to private archives; in the former case they're accessible by anyone who goes through the right channels, but in the latter they may be literally inaccessible to anyone else...)

Hi, This is an interesting idea indeed. However, I'm not sure it would fly, for two reasons: 1) I doubt many receivers (of journals, etc.) would be able to understand them well enough. Academic papers aren't always easy to understand, especially for a non-expert, and they could be, God forbid, _misunderstood_. 2) Service providers would, I think, be unwilling to catch on to this idea, given the low image of Wikipedia in many areas of academia. Thoughts? —Thomas Larsen

My experience is 100% to the contrary. By and large, we're not exclusively laypeople-- often we ARE the experts. Our math articles are written by math experts, our chemistry articles are written by chemists, our physics articles are written by physicists.

Plus, however difficult it is to understand articles, it's all the more difficult to try to write without any access to them, going exclusively by popular press accounts or abstracts. The results of having access are almost guaranteed to be better than the current situation, where some editors do have access, some editors don't have access, and so it's hard to double-check each other's work.

My experience, however, is that everyone in academia LOVES Wikipedia-- a few old fogeys excepted perhaps. But people who like to learn love a giant encyclopedia that's free and has entries on everything. Academia loves wikipedia-- they just don't like it when it's used for something it's not. A master carpenter loves having a power screwdriver for home repairs-- he just doesn't want to go to his jobsite and find his apprentices clumsily trying to use the blunt side of a power screwdriver to hammer nails.

Yes. A threat to a competitor's own self-interests can be a great motivator to promote Wikipedia's low image. It's comparable to the oil industry's perception of global warming.

Brockhaus never really tried and Britannica is pretty half hearted to the point there not even really the go to people when the media want an anti-wikipedia comment any more.

No academic publishing has a highly profitable business model and one they will fight much harder to defend than anyone we've previously run up against.

However we cannot meaningfully disrupt their business model (We do not have the strength in the academic world to push open access journals significantly and the wider public is irrelevant to them).

2008/12/25 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>:

> At this point the prudent move for us is to do nothing and continue to > exist. Which has actually worked out surprisingly well for us so far.

We've never run into anyone significant who's first reaction is to run to PR people and lobbyists. The PRC is hardly western media friendly and the poor IWF clearly isn't used to people caring about them. The hard Christian right we ran into back in what may? weren't interested in having any impact on the wider media. The various German people have tended not to realise what they are getting into.

It's actually quite hard to come up with a company or group that is both rich and media savy that we could end up seriously inconveniencing. School text book people perhaps?

Getty might be a candidate but their problem is more the internet as a whole(and since they are still worth a couple of billion they would appear to be surviving that).

The pictures of Mohamed thing was already overdone by the time it reached us but some religious groups might be a risk factor I suppose.