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

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:32 PM, THURNER rupert
<rupert.thurner at wikimedia.ch> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 21:50, Juergen Fenn <juergen.fenn at gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Am 08.03.11 21:36, schrieb Andrea Zanni:
>>
>>>> AFAIK, these publishers make the pricing upon the number of
>>> scholars/researchers/students of a certain university/corporation: I bet
>>> they would make us unbearable fees (in fact the potential users are hundred
>>> thousands, if not millions).
>>
>> That's right if you would negotiate with the publishers to have all
>> wikipedians take part in the the such a scheme, but access to academic
>> literature can only be offered to those authors who contribute regularly
>> and who are long-time part of a WikiProject or a Portal. Otherwise you
>> would have the effects you've described.
>>
>
> there might be another effect, which is imo more critical:
> one might argue that paying somebody to do the opposite of openining
> up the knowledge under a free license is completely against the basic
> mission of wmf, and the whole free knowledge movement. my personal
> guess is that quite a high number of people / donators do not like
> this.
>
> rupert.

We should have no illusion that the WMF or open content movement will
zero out the production of copyrighted and not-freely-licensed content
- most authors of books, most movie studios, most musicians depend on
revenue streams currently mostly unavailable under open content
licensing for their day to day income.  Lacking a total replacement
financial structure for the arts we cannot hope to affect complete
change.

The situation with regards to scientific journals varies somewhat, but
we can't imagine that all the content will just open up immediately.
Especially the legacy content.

Our encyclopedia (and other project) user community - the readers, not
the editors - derive significant value from citing sources and quoting
references which are the best available sources and references,
regardless of their copyright status and open content availability.

They would also gain from full access to the underlying journals and
citations and references, yes, but their primary benefit is that we're
reviewing and creating quality overview articles from the references.

We should encourage open content in every way.  But not dealing with
non-open content isn't a good choice.  Most contributors (financial
and volunteer) understand this, I hope.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com