[Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)

[phoebe ayers]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:29 PM, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/3/8 Juergen Fenn <juergen.fenn at gmx.de>:
>>
>>
>> Am 08.03.11 20:46, schrieb Samuel Klein:
>>> Melissa -- absolutely!  I don't know the real stats, but I think we
>>> cite OA jornals far more than any others in Wikipedia for this reason.
>>
>> Which is certainly a rather bad idea because what always counts first
>> must be the quality of content, not the license of a citation or whether
>> its available on-line or printed only.
>>
>
> Yes.. as well as there are areas of research for which there is no OER
> journals at all. Anyway - I don't think if WMF could afford providing
> access to scientific journals in aby scalable way. For example top
> chemistry journals published by American Chemical Society can be
> subscribed by institution - but in contract there is a limitation to a
> selected range of IP numbers and maximum download per year. The cost
> of intitutional subscription is around 2000 USD per journal.

Ha! I wish it were that cheap.

Some journals only cost hundreds, some many thousands. Some (OA) are
free to the reader. See:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/pricing/  or, for a more entertaining
website, see:  http://engineering.library.cornell.edu/about/StickerShock2

We certainly have many individual contacts with the OA community,
including Melissa Hagemann, who is on our advisory board :)  This is
also an area of professional work for me. What kinds of lobbying did
you have in mind?

-- Phoebe