--------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser) From: "Andreas Kolbe" jayen466@yahoo.com Date: Tue, March 15, 2011 6:32 am To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------
--- On Tue, 15/3/11, David Goodman dggenwp@gmail.com wrote:
From: David Goodman dggenwp@gmail.com
I've been involved with open access journals as a professional activity from the start of the movement, long before I joined Wikipedia. There has been only limited success. Though there are almost ten thousand open access journals, 95% of them are either very small or very unimportant, and in almost all fields of study, none or almost none of the important journals are open access:
This is my experience too; thanks for pointing it out.
No important journals at all in chemistry are open access, Almost none in physics Almost none in geology Almost none in ecology & evolution A few in molecular & cell biology A few only in biomedical sciences None in psychology Almost none in the social sciences or the humanities Almost none in engineering and applied science A few in medicine
<snip>
At this point, there is no academic field of study whatsoever where an adequate article could be written using only open access material. This is of course a very limiting thing for access to information not just for us, but for the world in general, and the WMF projects should certainly cooperate as closely as possible with the forces working for open access, but the suggestion that it is possible to limit to or even prefer open acces material is incompatible with the policy on using the best available sources.
Could someone from the Foundation please respond to the idea of contacting universities and content database providers and inviting them to support Wikipedia by making a certain number of log-in IDs available, with the benefit -- to them -- that increased citation of high-quality publications would potentially make these publications visible to a larger audience?
Is this something the Foundation would consider pursuing?
Andreas
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