[Foundation-l] Fwd: Open Access Call for brainstorming

Fri Jul 8 03:03:49 UTC 2011

Andrea Zanni started a lovely thread elsewhere asking about how to
help the Open Access movement in Italy, with some good replies
(below).  Forwarding to foundation-l as it is relevant to this list,
and linked to recent discussions here about how to fix the sad state
of closed journals.   [also perhaps appropriate for wikisource,
commons, and wikipedia, which all get mentioned as examples for
collaborations]

SJ

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Daniel Mietchen <daniel.mietchen at googlemail.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 9:36 PM

Dear all,

thanks for bringing me into this conversation, Melissa.

I see a number of areas in which the OA and WMF communities could join
forces, and several of these are relevant to the newly approved
project. None of these points is specific to Italy or Italian, but
although Italian had not been on my radar there yet (basically because
I can only understand it, not produce it myself), I agree that
addressing them together with existing communities with overlapping
interests is a good idea.

Let me outline a few:

(1) the WMF would benefit from feedback from the OA community on the
draft of a WMF policy on OA and open data. It currently exists in two
variants - a general mandate modeled after the NIH policy (cf.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Areas_of_interest/Open-access_policy
) and a scheme more cast in terms of practical implementation (cf.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WMF_support ) that takes into
account different degrees of WMF support for research projects (a
distinction not made at the NIH).

(2) both sides would benefit from a broader reuse of OA materials -
especially images - on WMF projects. I have collected some basic stats
on this at http://species-id.net/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Slides/Reuse-of-OA-on-Wikimedia
and think it would be very good to have a simple way of uploading all
suitably licensed OA materials to Commons or a sister directory (e.g.
http://figshare.com/ or similar). On a related note, the annual image
contest at Commons (for latest issue, see
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/29/commons-picture-year-winners-2011/
) features very few images that came from an OA source (so far, I only
found one - http://commons.wikimedia.org/?title=File:Culex_sp_larvae.png
; a finalist in 2007). Having some more systematic approach to getting
OA-sourced images featured as picture of the day/ month/ year would
certainly be good.

(3) the articles on OA and related topics are generally not in a good
shape, and typically not even assessed for quality. For the English
Wikipedia, I have started building a skeleton for what is to become an
overview of what OA-related articles would be desirable to have:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mietchen/OA_catalogue . Turning this
into a set of coherent articles will require something like a Task
force, even though the most relevant ones do not seem to be very
active these days, and there is not much of collaboration in this
regard across different WMF projects or even languages. Here, having
OA people involved across projects or languages would certainly be
beneficial.

(4) I think publishers (not just OA ones, actually) would benefit from
having a closer look at the RNA families Track at the journal RNA
Biology (which is not OA, btw), in which authors are required to
submit, for manuscripts reporting on new types of RNA families, the
draft for a corresponding Wikipedia article, which will be peer
reviewed along with the manuscript (see
http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/rnabiology/guidelines/ and
search for Wikipedia). Once the paper is published, the Wikipedia
article goes live, naturally citing the journal article, thus
providing the journal with exposure at a highly visible platform.
Similar partnerships are possible with other WMF projects (e.g.
http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikispecies:Collaboration_with_ZooKeys_and_PhytoKeys
).

(5) I think peer review in any journal (and at funding agencies, but
that is another story) would benefit from being conducted in the open
(cf. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/473452b ). One possibility here is to
post the reviews of accepted papers in public (e.g.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/8/62/prepub ), another to have
the manuscript posted in public and to invite public comments along
with public formal reviews (e.g.
http://www.biogeosciences-discuss.net/4/2959/2007/bgd-4-2959-2007-discussion.html
). This latter approach works only for publishers that accept green OA
in some form, but it works best for gold OA. Having some more OA
publishers experiment with such a system could, over time, develop
into something like "wiki-style" review at Scholarpedia (cf.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Help:Reviewers#Wiki-style_peer-review
), i.e. that reviewers edit the draft directly rather than commenting
on it. With such a system in place at (at least some) OA journals,
researchers could well be more motivated to contribute to
collaborative projects like those run by the WMF (see also the survey
at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Expert_participation_survey ).
Also related to the issue of motivation: Participants at the recent
Open Science Workshop at OAI7 voted "Change the way scientists are
evaluated" to the top of the agenda (cf.
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2011-July/000840.html ),
and joining forces with WMF (and funders) to get wiki contributions
included in the picture of scientific evaluation could well be
worthwhile too.

Expansion of the approach mentioned in (3) to languages other than
English is anticipated (though for the moment only to those three that
I can write articles in). For example, for the German Wikimedia
chapter's WikiConvention later this year, I have proposed a session in
preparation for Open Access Week (cf.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiConvention/Themensammlung#Wikimedia_und_Open_Access
), and this could certainly be coordinated with related activities on
the Italian end, or elsewhere.

During OA week, one could think of highlighting OA-derived content on
WMF projects, or having collaborative writing sessions on OA-related
topics, or having prizes for contributions along these lines.

Looking forward to further deepening of the discussion,

Daniel

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 11:04 PM, Melissa Hagemann <mhagemann at osi-dc.org> wrote:
> Hi SJ and Aubrey,
>
> Wonderful to hear that there is interest in Italy to find ways to bring together the WMF and OA communities.
>
< I'm adding Daniel Mietchen to the thread.... For years, I've thought
the OA and WMF communities had much in common and we should be doing
more to properly introduce the communities and build synergies between
them. So perhaps Daniel can help to brainstorm about what more could
be done in Italy and then Italy could become an example of what can be
accomplished in this area.
>
> In general, I think that by raising awareness of OA (and specifically the materials which are freely available through OA) within the WMF community, we could encourage more OA resources to be used as references in Wikipedia articles.  In addition, Wikimedians could become powerful allies in the OA movement, helping to make more content freely available through OA, so it could be used in more WMF projects.
>
> With regards to Italy, Aubrey, you mentioned that you are in close contact with many folks working on OA there, so you probably know about these resources, but I thought it would be helpful to share some info on those I've worked with in the past as well as current OA projects:
>
> - Paola Gargiulo (p.gargiulo at caspur.it) - you may already know Paola, but I think she's great and would probably enjoy being part of this conversation.
> - Portal for Italian Electronic Scholarly Literature in Institutional Archives - a service provider to Italian OA scholarly and research content; collects and  provides access to current information on OA in Italy and abroad http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi
> - OA Week Wiki in Italian - http://wiki.openarchives.it/index.php/Pagina_principale
> - OA Mailing list in Italian: http://openarchives.it/mailman/listinfo/oa-italia
>
> Excited to see what we can do to make Italy an example of what can be achieved through collaboration between the OA and WMF communities.
>
> Best,
> Melissa
>
> Melissa Hagemann
> Senior Program Manager
> Information Program
> Open Society Foundations