Open access
Open access resources and projects.
The Open Access movement is a movement to make all scholarly literature, and all publicly funded research, freely available to everyone online.
See the WikiProject Open Access!
How to help
Finding guides to OA.
- There is a "best practices guide" to institutional OA policies, via SPARC: Campus Based Publishing
- Currently, ask your librarian for details
Policy wishlist
- By country
- There are only 14 countries in which at least one research funder has an Open Access policy (see ROARMAP). Now including the NIH mandate from 2008. Look at templates and push for one to take effect in your country.
- Spread one success in your country to others. There are 24 total funding agencies in the US national government; only NIH has the above, and SPARC and others are pushing to extend that model.
- By field
- Write about open publishing
- Information is power. You have the power to have impact, to change things, to make them better. (Aaron Swartz)
- WP will open up the world. And you will bring your knowledge back to it.
- By topic
- Alternate metrics
- design and promote alt metrics that include publishing through Wikipedia. Articulate how publishing to WP helps to spread adoption of methods and ideas. Maintain, evaluate, and publish the results of evaluating those metrics.
- Lowest-hanging fruit to make OA the default for everyone:
- Target research funders
- get them to require OA publishing to get funding. This affects 80% of all research (by #? by impact?) but much research is funded more by international agencies, not just gov. agencies.
- Sensitize people to WP as an OA signal
- get them to check the reference section on WP articles to measure OA impact.
- Get Wikimedia's public support
- Indicate global support for the effort and alignment of OA and free knowledge. The idea that OA is essential and part of good research.
Examples of OA in use
Jack Andraka (@jackandraka) won the ISEF science fair for his work creating a better test for pancreatic cancer (~10^9 better overall [performance*price] than existing tests). Most of the detailed research he needed beyond Google + Wikipedia knowledge was locked behind paywalls. ~$20-100 per item.
The Right to Research Coalition was student-run in the US. it played a meaningful role in getting the US to do the right thing.
The article on Jack Andraka doesn't exist in Kazakh; that could be a good experience to think about the issues invovled. Why did that matter to him, what did he achieve?
Wikimedia activities
- Wikimedia Italia's Wiki and Open Access (Italian) (Open Access Week 2009, see short report (English))
- Wikimedia Italia's Condivisione, scienza, bene comune (Italian), Digital Freedoms Festival 2010.
Wikimania 2013 OA panel
- Etherpad for notes
Nick Shockey - leads the Right to Research Coalition.
Lane Rasberry - WiR for Consumer Reports.
Lesley Chan - bio informatics journal and related journals. It's a platform basd in Brazil since 1993. He's also assoc. director at U. Toronto Scarborough, teaching and studying how OA could address the N/S imbalance in knowledge production and related development issues: including neglected tropical diseases, food security, and social justice.
Daniel Mietchen - biophysicist; working on semantic data on the web. WM work on science sustainability, outreach to science communities, and collaboration across projects and chapters. WiR on Open Science. (slides)
Aubrey - digital librarian, works with Open Access journals from University of Bologna. Slides