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

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Tue, 8/3/11, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>
> 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.


The main initiative should be in telling universities or other content
providers that this is one way they can help Wikipedia.

In addition, a case can be made to providers of copyrighted content that
providing free access to active Wikipedians may actually benefit them
financially. 

How so?

An article* by Caspar Grathwohl (Oxford University Press) in The Chronicle
a few weeks ago contained this telling passage:

---o0o---

One scholar issued a challenge: Wikipedia is where students are starting 
research, whether we like it or not, so we need to improve its music 
entries. That call to arms resonated, and music scholars worked hard to 
improve the quality of Wikipedia entries and make sure that bibliographies 
and citations pointed to the most reliable resources. 

***As a result, Oxford University Press experienced a tenfold increase in 
Wikipedia-referred traffic on its music-research site Grove Music Online.***

Research that began on Wikipedia led to (the more advanced and peer-
validated) Grove Music, for researchers who were going on to do in-depth 
scholarly work.

---o0o---

This effect should not be underestimated. Providers should be alerted to
the fact that such an arrangement may benefit them, by making their 
material visible to an immense new target audience. Grove Music Online 
is a subscription site.**

As George says, copyrighted content will not disappear. The people who do
high-quality research invest considerable amounts of time in their work, 
and they rely on income from publications just like musicians do. We cannot
expect them to work for free. But spreading the knowledge they have worked
hard to collect is both in our and their interest.

There is no need to provide login access to everyone who creates a Wikipedia
user account. Most of the committed content work is done by regulars, who 
number a few thousand; certainly far less than the number of students in
the world who are granted such access. 

Of course we would expect that providers and universities will only be able 
to provide a limited number of users with access. But access rights could be 
awarded on the basis of merit, say, to users who have written at least one 
Featured Article (Exzellenter Artikel, etc.), or have contributed 50 DYKs, 
or what have you. This would actually provide users with a motivation to 
create quality content as well.

It's worth thinking about. Perhaps Grathwohl might be worth contacting 
about precise figures for the traffic increase they experienced, and how
it affected their bottom line. He might be able to advise us on how 
feasible it would be to base a marketing strategy on this effect that
could be pitched to content providers. Anyone in the Foundation interested
in giving this a go?

Andreas

* http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899/
** http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/;jsessionid=93B8672443F20934DC6FAF3B3F96FE3D