Hi Daniel,
thanks for starting this thread, it's a very important project and repositories such as springerimages.com (which specifically allow searching for OA media) could be a goldmine of scientific content for commons.The Wellcome Trust in Britain is also running a pilot project (involving GLAM people) to study the best model for collaboration between scientific institutions producing large volumes of digital media and Commons, which sounds really exciting.
A concern I have with the mass upload idea is that being OA doesn't necessarily imply being available under a public license that allows reuse. A quick inspection at number of OA images from SpringerImages suggests that they can indeed be reused under a CC-BY, but I assume this is not necessarily the case in general, correct? The distinction between OA and CC-licensed contents is something we should keep in mind as part of our policy making effort within RCom.
Dario
On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 2:12 AM, Daniel Mietchen < daniel.mietchen@googlemail.com> wrote:
Dear all,
Wikimedia Commons hosts a lot of images (and some other files) from OA publishers (e.g.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=1... ), and I am wondering whether that could be streamlined a bit.
Some issues that possibly stand in the way: (1) It is not clear what percentage of such files from suitably licensed papers would be of use in pages that use media hosted at Commons (either at Wikimedia or via InstantCommons). If that percentage is low, then the costs of hosting the unused files may outweigh the benefit of having the used ones, though the ease of automated upload (and possibly gardening) could shift the balance quite a bit. (2) Every publisher (and often journal) organize their files differently, which the upload scripts would have to take into account. Would this mean that multiple bot accounts would have to be requested as per http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Requests ? If so, some means of enforcing common standards would be necessary.
Not sure whether RCom-l is the right place to discuss that, but I thought I'd give it a try, since working on standards is part of our mission.
Thanks and cheers,
Daniel
-- http://www.google.com/profiles/daniel.mietchen
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