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

[Melissa Hagemann]

On Mar 8, 2011, "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.
> 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.

It would be wonderful if we could find a way for the WMF and OA
communities to more closely collaborate. Aubrey is right in that to a
large extent, OA is not well known outside the library community. Given
the reach of WMF, there seems that there must be a way to try to raise
greater awareness of the materials which are being made available
through OA. 

And if there is interest in advocating on this issue, SPARC developed
the Alliance for Taxpayer Access
(http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/index.shtml) which represents
universities, libraries, patient advocacy groups, and physicians working
to promote OA. 

> 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.

Many OA journals use CC-BY and the DOAJ promotes its use, see
http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=loadTempl&templ=080423. 

Melissa

> 
> Aubrey
>