[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

[George Herbert]

On 10/16/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:

> Another example, unrelated to copyright reform: Wikipedia editors need
> access to primary sources, particularly academic journals. The fate of
> current ventures in Open Access journals largely determines whether most
> potential Wikipedia editors will have easy access to the sources they need
> in the years to come, and funding for these journals (or lack thereof)
> will
> be a major factor.
>


Oh, very good.

That brings up a whole host of other related ideas...


1) Would a fraction of the money going to subsidize operations of journals,
to make it viable for them to go Open Access, make sense?  Form a WikiMedia
subsidiary open journal foundation to do that?


2) Completely separately; WMF purchasing "institutional subscription"
primary source electronic subscriptions to appropriate journals and
conference proceedings in the humanities and sciences, the equivalent to
what libraries get for universities etc.  Would probably require
establishing some level of threshold for access to them - buying an
institutional subscription now doesn't let you give it away free to everyone
in the world, but journals might go for it if say the threshold was "any
Wikipedia editor with 1,000 plus edits".

That's not going to completely open the material, but does get it available
as a common reference pool by active editors.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com