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

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Tue, 15/3/11, David Goodman <dggenwp at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: David Goodman <dggenwp at gmail.com>

> I've been involved with open 
> access journals  as a professional
> activity from the start of the movement, long before I
> joined
> Wikipedia. There has been only limited success. 
> Though there are
> almost ten thousand open access journals, 95% of them are
> either very
> small or very unimportant, and  in almost all fields
> of study, none or
> almost none of the important journals are open access:


This is my experience too; thanks for pointing it out.


> No important journals at all in chemistry are open access,
> Almost none in physics
> Almost none in geology
> Almost none in ecology & evolution
> A few in molecular & cell biology
> A few only in biomedical sciences
> None in psychology
> Almost none in the social sciences or the humanities
> Almost none in engineering and applied science
> A few in medicine
<snip>
> At this point, there is no academic field of study
> whatsoever where an
> adequate article could be written using only open access
> material.
> This is of course a very limiting thing for access to
> information not
> just for us, but for the world in general, and the WMF
> projects should
> certainly cooperate  as closely as possible with the
> forces working
> for open access, but the suggestion that it is possible to
> limit to or
> even prefer open acces material is incompatible with the
> policy on
> using the best available sources.


Could someone from the Foundation please respond to the idea of contacting
universities and content database providers and inviting them to support 
Wikipedia by making a certain number of log-in IDs available, with the 
benefit -- to them -- that increased citation of high-quality publications
would potentially make these publications visible to a larger audience?

Is this something the Foundation would consider pursuing?

Andreas