Hello,
Very well-written and well-supported by statistics. Thanks for sharing.
Regards.
User:Titodutta
On Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 1:41 AM Jake Orlowitz <jorlowitz(a)gmail.com> wrote:
My Letter to the U.S. Office for Science and
Technology Policy regarding a
proposal for federally mandate open access to publicly-funded research...
---
Wikipedia is one of the ten most popular websites in the world. Each month
200,000 editors improve over 6 million articles. This vital public
information is viewed on 1 billion unique devices as our pages are loaded
by people around the globe 7,000 times per second.
Wikipedia is the "free encyclopedia", both in its open CC-BY-SA licensing
as well as the unpaid contributions of its volunteer editors. Yet
Wikipedia's hundreds of thousands of editors struggle to access scholarly
research. And, if they are able to read and cite it, then hundreds of
millions of readers cannot verify or explore it for deeper research.
Citations are the bridge between Wikipedia articles and a broader landscape
of reliable, secondary sources. Citations not only allow readers to verify
the reliability of the facts they find in Wikipedia; through citations
readers can also deep-dive into any given topic by exploring the books,
scholarly publications, and news stories referenced in an article.
A recently released dataset of all citations with identifiers in Wikipedia
found that less than half of the official versions of scholarly
publications cited with an identifier in Wikipedia are freely available on
the web. This chasm of for editors and for readers is a tragedy of public
education and digital literacy.
Just look at the most recent global catastrophe with Coronavirus. By April
2020 the main articles on COVID-19 had received 50 million views.
Wikipedia's medical content--made up of more than 155,000 articles and 1
billion bytes of text across more than 255 languages--has been ranked as
one of the top-3 most viewed sources for medical information on the entire
internet.
References are essential to the public's trust in Wikipedia. Indeed,
Wikipedia's medical content is supported by 757,855 references in English
and 1,596,528 in other languages, for a total of 2,354,383 across all
languages. In English 168,985 have a PMID while 261,850 do in other
languages. This means at least 430,835 references are journal articles.
What happens when those journal articles lie behind a paywall? The public
suffers from a dearth of good information to make decisions about their
lives as independent citizens and members of a global community.
As founder of The Wikipedia Library, I arranged partnerships with dozens of
leading scholarly journals, to give Wikipedia editors free access to their
reliable content and so they would be able to do effective and rigorous
research. This time-intensive process took 6 years to amass access to only
1/5th of the most highly regarded academic publications. Frankly, Wikipedia
editors--volunteers who selflessly give of their intelligence and passion
to educate--should not have to beg and borrow to access publicly-funded
research. Readers should not hit paywalls when they are seeking
citizen-supported knowledge.
I implore you to make the bold but entirely reasonable decision and ensure
that taxpayers have access to the vital scientific and scholarly studies
that they themselves fund. This is not only sensible, it is essential to
civic health, societal progress, and human flourishing.
Sincerely,
Jake Orlowitz
Founder of The Wikipedia Library
---
"Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code
Resulting From Federally Funded Research"
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/02/19/2020-03189/request-for…
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