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

[Samuel Klein]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 3:53 PM, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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?
>>
>> I was just waiting the librarians to weigh in :-)
> I'm really not sure of what we can do together, but I certainly was
> astonished when few years ago I learned about open access. We have many
> things in common, and in a certain sense we are more closer to the OA
> movement than the free software one.
> Nonetheless, the OA is mainly known by librarians, and (at least in Italy)
> few scholars and researchers.

Perhaps we can help bridge the gap.

> I think the Wikimedia could do his part to promote OA, and discuss with
> members of OA to build common strategies. Or at least get to know each
> other, there are plenty of things we can learn from one another.

Plenty of things.  How does OA target audiences to embrace their
vision for open access to journals?  How could we promote a similar
vision for open access to knowledge -- in a way that could influence
other sorts of authors and publishers?

> Furthermore, another direction could be discuss about licensing: OA has a
> "weird" form of licensing scholarship, and a way to make the main OA
> licenses (e.g Bethesda) compatible with CC-BY or CC-BY-SA could be an huge
> step forward.

I entirely agree.  At the very least, coming up with a name in the OA
framework for a CC-SA-compatible license (and the acceptance of reuse
that this entails) would help us have these conversations without each
side running up against unfamiliar jargon.

SJ