GLAM/Newsletter/January 2012/Contents/Open Access report
|
WikiProject Open Access; Featured Frogs; Tool testing
ByAbout
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:
- starting and improving articles related to open access, as per this provisional list
- flagging OA-ness of references cited in articles on any topic, by way of Template:Open access
- bringing Open-Access articles onto Wikisource
- bringing materials from open-access publications onto Commons
- 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:
- in the category Open access (publishing) (or any of its subcategories) on Wikimedia Commons
- in the Public Domain (by ways other than copyright expiration) or licensed under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA
- 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.
Home | About | Archives | Subscribe | Suggestions | Newsroom |