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Open Access report

Open Access at Wikimania 2013 & 2014 and on the Main Pages; New mailing list

By Daniel Mietchen
The Wikimania London delegation applauding the Wikimania Hong Kong team for a "beautifully smooth" event.

Open Access at Wikimania

Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong was the largest real-life gathering of WikiProject Open Access so far, with about one third of its current members attending. Their main contribution to the Wikimania program was a dedicated panel that followed up on a similar one organized at an Open Access meeting in June in Geneva and addressed past, present and potential future interactions between the Open Access and Wikimedia communities. That included, for instance, the idea of an Open Access Button (see below) or that of signalling to Wikipedia readers and editors how openly a cited references is actually available (details). Naturally, Open Access to the scholarly literature was also touched upon in other sessions (e.g. the Science GLAM session or the multimedia roundtable) as well as at WikiSym, which was held in Hong Kong too this year, right before Wikimania.

At the Wikimania closing ceremony, the organizers of next year's Wikimania London announced that outreach to the Open Access community would be one of the central themes of the event. To coordinate activities around that, Stuart Lawson was designated as community liaison, and a project page set up for others to chime in.

Open Access Button

The OA Button is a browser-based tool currently under development which aims to track every time someone is denied access to a scholarly article (explained further in this blog post), and help people find open access versions instead. They are hoping to integrate this with Wikipedia somehow. A hackathon is taking place in London on 7-8 September.

Open Access puts new species on Wikimedia Main Pages

On August 15, a new mammalian species was formally described in the open-access journal ZooKeys: Bassaricyon neblina, the "olinguito". On the same day, Wikipedia articles on the subject had been started in eight languages, four of which displayed the news on their main pages: Catalan, English, Portuguese and Russian, with an article on the Polish Wikinews completing the picture. By now, the article exists in over 40 languages and has been featured – with image – on the main pages of multiple Wikipedias (as, ca, en, es, fi, fr, he, hu, in, ms, nl, pt, ru, sv, ta, tl, uk, zh) and of Wikispecies, with additional entries in Wiktionaries (en, fr), and Wikinews (eo).

Few newly described species (or taxa more generally, for that matter) receive that much attention from the Wikimedia community – other examples include the frog Paedophryne amauensis (30 Wikipedia languages) or the chameleon Brookesia micra (27) – but those who do have usually been described in open-access journals. Overall, 20 files taken directly or adapted from the original research article about the "olinguito" are available on Commons, of which 14 have been used a total of 112 times. This is the kind of reuse of open-access materials that is central to the Signalling OA-ness initiative mentioned above, as it would not be possible with articles that are simply free to read, or even locked behind a paywall, instead of being available for free under a license that allows for images to be uploaded to (and remain on) Wikimedia Commons.

New mailing list

Since August 28, a public mailing list exists to help coordinate activities at the interface between Wikimedia and Open Access. It can be reached via https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/openaccess .

Open Access Media Importer

The following represents a selection of the 592 files files that have been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month, bringing the total to over 13,500. If you can think of wiki pages where these files could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.

Open Access File of the Day

The following files have been featured as Open Access File of the Day this month:


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