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Open Access report
By Daniel Mietchen
T. rex infection.png featured as Image of the Week on the Czech Wikipedia during the first week of January (traffic stats). Another version of the file served as Open Access File of the Day on December 27. You can nominate a file.
The frog Paedophryne amauensis on a US dime. The image was featured on the Main Page of at least the Thai, Bulgarian, English, German, French, Chinese, Norwegian, Finnish and Russian Wikipedias in January (see gallery) and served as Open Access File of the Day on January 12, the day after the open-access article with the taxonomic description of the species had been published. The associated wiki articles about the species have been featured - or are scheduled to be so - on several other wikis, including the Spanish, West Flemish, Portuguese, Simple and Polish Wikipedias. It now exists in over 20 languages (see cross-wiki access stats). While being featured, it also drove considerable traffic to articles about the journal in which the original image was published (PLoS ONE) as well as its publisher (PLoS).
Provisional banner for Topic Pages at PLoS Computational Biology
A PDF copy of the article en:Research Works Act served as Open Access File of the Day on January 18 during the SOPA blackout. The article had been featured in the Did you know section of the English Wikipedia on January 15 (access stats for Research Works Act, United States House of Representatives and Open access mandate).

About

The Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science project does not fit well into the Germany report, so this Open Access report will serve to highlight activities in this area throughout the month.

Initiatives

WikiProject Open Access

On January 10, WikiProject Open Access was started by User:Bluerasberry on the basis of an earlier proposal. It has the following goals:

  1. starting and improving articles related to open access, as per this provisional list
  2. flagging OA-ness of references cited in articles on any topic, by way of Template:Open access
  3. bringing Open-Access articles onto Wikisource
  4. bringing materials from open-access publications onto Commons
  5. supporting the reuse of such open-access-derived materials across Wikimedia projects

As a first step, existing articles within the scope of the project have been assessed for importance and quality, resulting in the following distribution (as of January 24):

Open access articles by quality and importance
Quality Importance
Top-Class High-Class Mid-Class Low-Class NA-Class Unknown-Class Total
B-Class 5 7 2 1 15
C-Class 10 4 6 2 22
Start-Class 1 5 14 15 35
Stub-Class 3 1 4 11 19
List-Class 1 1
NA-Class 2 14 16
Assessed-Class 20 19 26 29 14 0 108
Unassessed-Class 1 1
Total 20 19 26 29 14 1 109

The Open Access File of the Day initiative that had been started in December (and briefly presented at GLAMcamp Amsterdam) will continue under the auspices of the WikiProject, highlighting files (or sets thereof) on Wikimedia Commons that are:

  1. in the category Open access (publishing) (or any of its subcategories) on Wikimedia Commons
  2. in the Public Domain (by ways other than copyright expiration) or licensed under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA
  3. used on at least two wiki pages outside user namespace, either on Wikimedia projects or on sites using InstantCommons, from the day of nomination until the day of posting.

By the end of January, WikiProject Open Access had five members.

Topic Pages at PLoS Computational Biology

In September, the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology expressed an interest in publishing review articles suitable for being posted to the English Wikipedia as a seed for an evolving overview article on the subject (Signpost coverage). This kind of reuse of Open Access materials on Wikimedia projects - made possible by the journal using a Creative Commons Attribution license - goes beyond some existing partnerships with scientific journals, e.g. that with RNA Biology, which requires authors of manuscripts on new RNA families to accompany their submissions with the draft for a Wikipedia article (Wikinews coverage). By now, PLoS Computational Biology has established a dedicated manuscript track - Topic Pages - and the first manuscript has passed peer review and entered production. The initiative was well received at the Academic Publishing in Europe conference, one of the key conferences on scholarly publishing worldwide, where the Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science gave a plenary talk.

Featured content

Materials from Open Access sources or otherwise related to Open Access have been featured on several Wikipedias this month. The following examples have been gathered manually, but it would be nice to have some automated support for that. Technical aspects of the documentation of such feature events are also the subject of a dedicated section in the tool testing report.

Public consultations

In November, the White House's OSTP had issued a Request for Information on matters of Open Access, and a response has been submitted on January 12 on behalf of RCOM. It was officially received as response 298 of 375.

The results of a similar consultation by the European Commission, to which a WMF response had been submitted in September, have also been published in January.

Tools

A number of tools for the documentation of Open Access-related activities have been tested - see the Tool testing report. Work on the Open Access Media Importer, a tool to automatically upload multimedia files from Open Access sources, has started, supported by Wikimedia Germany's Wissenswert initative.


Check back for a new edition next month.
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