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

[David Goodman]

Universities can't do this, generally. All contracts I have ever seen
limit the off-campus access to people connected with the university. A
few  publishers even limit the on-campus access similarly, but most
publishers explicitly permit it.

But many universities do even worse than the contracts say: they limit
on-campus access in such a way as to not permit access to visitors.
This is true even of some public universities. Various excuses are
offerred, none of them valid--the usual one is lack of computer
facilities, which lost its credibility a number of years ago.


On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 8:32 AM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- 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
>
>
>
>
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-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG