[Foundation-l] Journal Boycott

[MZMcBride]

Liam Wyatt wrote:
> On 2 February 2012 00:31, Daniel Mietchen
> <daniel.mietchen at googlemail.com>wrote:
> 
>> I think that skipping non-OA sources is not a valid option, though
>> encouragement of the use of relevant OA sources is.
>> 
>> One way to achieve that could be by highlighting the "OA-ness" of
>> cited references, as is now common practice in the Research section of
>> the Signpost (most recent example:
>> 
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-01-30/Recent_
>> research#References
>> ).
>> 
>> So far, this flagging is done manually, but at least for publishers
>> that use the same Creative Commons license for all the articles they
>> publish, it would be easy to modify citation templates like
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_journal to include the OA
>> icon for all DOIs belonging to the prefixes listed at
>> 
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/Open_Knowledge_Foundation_Germany
>> /Open_Access_Catalogue/OA_publishers/DOI_prefixes_entirely_OA
>> . Things get a bit more complicated on the journal level, especially
>> in the case of hybrid OA journals, in which some articles are OA,
>> others not, and even the OA ones may be under different licenses.
>> 
>> <snip>
> 
> THIS!
> 
> I agree with what was said before that it would be technically (and
> intellectually) difficulty to boycott links to particular sources from
> Wikipedias. I think it would be fantastic if we could *promote* Open Access
> sources in our references - see Daniel's link to the Signpost (above) for a
> good example. If we could overcome some technical difficulties (Daniel
> describes some above). This would be a positive action to support OA rather
> than a punitive action against other less open (but still legal) publishers
> of Reliable Sources. It would also help promote the idea of OA sources in
> the general public.
> Ideally this could be done automatically by compiling a list of "OA
> compliant" sources and automatically adding in the OA icon to a footnote
> whenever the relevant citation code is called.

Feature requests go in Bugzilla: <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/>. :-)

It's fairly easy to recognize URLs by protocol (MediaWiki already does it to
spot mailto: links and irc: links and add pretty icons). Comparing against a
list that's maintained in the MediaWiki namespace probably wouldn't be very
difficult. It'd go in an extension, I guess.

Extensions are nice for something like this because they can be deployed
across all Wikimedia wikis easily. It might even make sense to have a global
journals list at Meta-Wiki. Don't know how often these resources are cited
cross-language, though.

MZMcBride