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

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

I agree with Aubrey, Melissa, SJ etc.
We should indeed promote OA journals and thesis (give a look at 
http://www.dart-europe.eu : almost 200.000 full text OA from 324 
universities and 19 countries automatically collected and searchable 
thanks to the magics of OA and OAI-PMH), and encourage OA publishers to 
promote their content on Wikimedia projects.
I don't think that it's viable at all to acquire specific 
journal/database accounts; it's better to create a network of university 
students willing to provide references and articles on request. For 
instance, I've tried to do so and I offered to consult the World 
Biographical Information System Online to help people working on 
biographies 
(http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Biografie/Strumenti/Fonti ) but 
nobody has ever asked, so perhaps a global, more advertised program is 
needed.
Another solution is to make university students edit; the fact that they 
have access to a lot of resources is one of the reasons for the public 
policy initiative/global university program.

David Goodman, 15/03/2011 18:45:
> 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.

I confirm this for Italy (where additionally there isn't any status or 
actual affiliation for ex students).
There may be another reason, though, i.e. that sometimes, if I recall 
correctly, fees are based not only on the number of students etc. but 
rather on the FTE (full time equivalent) students or professors etc. If 
you add random people it's very difficult to use those criteria, which 
are usually good to decrease costs.
In general, those contracts are already horribly complicated and I doubt 
anyone would like to make things even worse.

Nemo