Hi all,

IMO there are no restrictions for citing an article originally published in a commercial journal. Scientists do this all the time within their own works, for academic purposes. Commercial journals want this in order to drive interest/traffic to their sites. However, most commercial academic publishers are extremely expensive. Elsevier publications, for example, operate at up to 38% profit, as discussed in WSJ and Wash Post. There are ALSO many non-profit/academic/free citation databases which provide these same scientific and academic articles. Some considerations of providing links to cited articles:

1. When a link is provided to a commercial publisher/journal, there is no assurance the link location will not change over time. Link resolvers are used to manage this issue, these are onerous and expensive to buy and run. Providing a DOI, digital object identifier, is the cleanest way to assure you are providing a consistent reference to the item you are citing. 2. Any work funded by the US Government, is licensed by the government to be used "for government purposes." There is some intra-governmental debate over this, some arguing that the governments' stated mission is to make all federally funded research results publicly available (to the public, not just to commercial subscribers.) Others arguing that commercial publication should be protected and encouraged for providing peer-review process. NIH is currently embroiled in an attempt by Congressmen Conyers to repeal legislation enacted in January, 2008, requiring open-access to NIH funded research results. Here is a link to further info on that: http://depaullaw.typepad.com/library/2008/10/publisher-backl.html . In addition: Cornell University has some good information on this subject:http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/openaccessday.html 3. There are ample open-access resources where this material is hosted that duplicate commercial publishers, where the links would be more stable and free from copyright or other restrictions. Some of these are: Office of Scientific & Technical Information: http: //www.science.gov , PubMed Central: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/, arXiv: http://arxiv.org/ , California Digital Library:http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/

I hope this addresses the line of discussion.

Voxhumana

On Nov 28, 2008, at 7:00 AM, Charlotte Webb wrote:

On 11/28/08, THURNER rupert rupert.thurner@wikimedia.ch wrote:

...

some sites to cite an article about medical visualization [2]. when looking at it i noticed:

• that it is published in a cc-2.5 licensed journal
• that there is a possibility to enter links from facebook, stumble

upon, ...

• that there is no link to do make a reference in wiki*

would it make sense that a wikimedia page allows referencing such an article? the functions of such a page could be:

• enter it in a (not yet existing) references library (bibtex or

whatever)

• add it to a portal talk page selected by the user (like medicine)
• add it to project selected by the user (like wpedia, wversity, ...)

imo the advantages would be that on one hand quality may rise through better citations, on the other hand having a citation library where researchers in future want to be and need to be.

It would be easy use javascript to fill out a {{cite news}} template or whatever based on the url parameters. However the intersection of "sites we want to newcomers to easily link to" and "sites which take us seriously enough to provide a url for doing so" might be smaller than we'd hope.

—C.W.

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