Jake, well written and nicely put. Is this online somewhere, where we can share it further?
Best, Shani.
----------------------------------------------- *Shani Evenstein Sigalov*
* Lecturer, Tel Aviv University. * EdTech Innovation Strategist, NY/American Medical Program, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University.
* PhD Candidate, School of Education, Tel Aviv University. * Azrieli Foundation Research Fellow. * OER & Emerging Technologies Coordinator, UNESCO Chair https://education.tau.ac.il/node/3495 on Technology, Internationalization and Education, School of Education, Tel Aviv University https://education.tau.ac.il/node/3495.
* Member of the Board of Trustees https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/shani-evenstein-sigalov/, Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/. * Chairperson, The Hebrew Literature Digitization Society http://www.israelgives.org/amuta/580428621. * Chief Editor, Project Ben-Yehuda http://benyehuda.org.
+972-525640648
On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 11:27 PM Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:
Jake,
How can we most effectively support your excellent effort with this?
-Pete
Pete Forsyth User:Peteforsyth on Meta, English Wikisource, English Wikipedia, etc.
On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 1:22 PM Tito Dutta trulytito@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, Very well-written and well-supported by statistics. Thanks for sharing. Regards. User:Titodutta
On Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 1:41 AM Jake Orlowitz jorlowitz@gmail.com wrote:
My Letter to the U.S. Office for Science and Technology Policy
regarding
a
proposal for federally mandate open access to publicly-funded
research...
Wikipedia is one of the ten most popular websites in the world. Each
month
200,000 editors improve over 6 million articles. This vital public information is viewed on 1 billion unique devices as our pages are
loaded
by people around the globe 7,000 times per second.
Wikipedia is the "free encyclopedia", both in its open CC-BY-SA
licensing
as well as the unpaid contributions of its volunteer editors. Yet Wikipedia's hundreds of thousands of editors struggle to access
scholarly
research. And, if they are able to read and cite it, then hundreds of millions of readers cannot verify or explore it for deeper research.
Citations are the bridge between Wikipedia articles and a broader
landscape
of reliable, secondary sources. Citations not only allow readers to
verify
the reliability of the facts they find in Wikipedia; through citations readers can also deep-dive into any given topic by exploring the books, scholarly publications, and news stories referenced in an article.
A recently released dataset of all citations with identifiers in
Wikipedia
found that less than half of the official versions of scholarly publications cited with an identifier in Wikipedia are freely available
on
the web. This chasm of for editors and for readers is a tragedy of
public
education and digital literacy.
Just look at the most recent global catastrophe with Coronavirus. By
April
2020 the main articles on COVID-19 had received 50 million views. Wikipedia's medical content--made up of more than 155,000 articles and
1
billion bytes of text across more than 255 languages--has been ranked
as
one of the top-3 most viewed sources for medical information on the
entire
internet.
References are essential to the public's trust in Wikipedia. Indeed, Wikipedia's medical content is supported by 757,855 references in
English
and 1,596,528 in other languages, for a total of 2,354,383 across all languages. In English 168,985 have a PMID while 261,850 do in other languages. This means at least 430,835 references are journal articles.
What happens when those journal articles lie behind a paywall? The
public
suffers from a dearth of good information to make decisions about their lives as independent citizens and members of a global community.
As founder of The Wikipedia Library, I arranged partnerships with
dozens
of
leading scholarly journals, to give Wikipedia editors free access to
their
reliable content and so they would be able to do effective and rigorous research. This time-intensive process took 6 years to amass access to
only
1/5th of the most highly regarded academic publications. Frankly,
Wikipedia
editors--volunteers who selflessly give of their intelligence and
passion
to educate--should not have to beg and borrow to access publicly-funded research. Readers should not hit paywalls when they are seeking citizen-supported knowledge.
I implore you to make the bold but entirely reasonable decision and
ensure
that taxpayers have access to the vital scientific and scholarly
studies
that they themselves fund. This is not only sensible, it is essential
to
civic health, societal progress, and human flourishing.
Sincerely, Jake Orlowitz Founder of The Wikipedia Library
"Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code Resulting From Federally Funded Research"
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/02/19/2020-03189/request-for-...
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