[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

[David Goodman]

The priority purchase in the sciences is very clear:
I/
The standard modern enclyclopedias and other refereneces works:
Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of chemistry and chemical technology,
Walker's Mammals of the World,
Encyclopedia of Life Sciences,  and so on.
Most, but not quite all, are already available in digital format.
Some, such as ELS, do not actually make a profit.  Almost all are
esigned for the advancedd undergraduate level.
The difficulty would not be that of acquiring them, but of keeping
them up to date.

II/
The news content of Nature and Science.
these do make quite a profit, though.

III/
Scientific American
tho perhaps a little below our level, it is exceptionally well and
consistently edited/rewritten, and has had major financial
difficulties in the past.

IV/
Such journals as
Physics today
Chemical and engineeering news,
and the equivalents.

V/
Some of the major review and current awareness journals:
Accounts of Chemical Research,
Nature reviews in,  etc.
These are very up to date, and while some of the content is of the
graduate level, much should be accessible. I wouldn't suggest getting
them all. I would suggest instead selective licensing of content.

But I am not sure it would necessarily be the best approach to
incorporate the material here, rather than to make the publications
themselves open access.

Perhaps our role would then be as an index, and our database consist
of pointers.







maybe not Annual review of []


Probably about

On 10/15/06, ScottL <scott at mu.org> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> > would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> > generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> > purchased and freed.
> >
> > Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> > copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> > like to see purchased and released under a free license?
> >
> > Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
> > be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
> >
> > I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a
> > position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what
> > we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would
> > expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
> >
> > --Jimbo
>
>    Someone may have suggested this below in the thread, I have only read
> about half of it.  But, I thought I would throw it in anyway.  According
> to our article on the topic Encyclopædia Britannica started losing sales
> and value in the company around 1990 and then sold for 135 million in
> 1996.  All print encyclopedias seem to be doing less well than in the
> past for obvious reasons.  I think this might make them open to the
> ideas of selling the copyrights (not the companies) to earlier versions.
>    The 1911 Britannica has been pretty useful to the project I suspect
> that older editions of a number of print encyclopedias might also be useful.
>
> SKL
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.