[open-science] [Open-access] OKF at Open Repositories 2014

Sat Dec 7 23:23:09 UTC 2013

On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Heather Morrison
<Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:
> Scholarship and wikipedia - evidence to date?
That's a very general question, so here are some general pointers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Talks/Zentrum_f%C3%BCr_Europ%C3%A4ische_Wirtschaftsforschung_2013/Interaction_between_Wikimedia_and_the_Research_Community
.

With respect to the subject of this thread, it may indeed be
interesting to discuss Wikimedia platforms as repositories of
scholarly materials, or their interaction with more classical
repositories.

> Here is the summary of progress to date from the PLoS 2012/13 Progress
> Update:
> http://www.plos.org/about/what-is-plos/progress-updates/
>
> If a willing scholarly community with an interest in this experiment has
> only come up with 4 wikipedia pages, it is quite a stretch to extrapolate
> from this a wide-spread desire by the scholarly community at large to move
> our works to Wikipedia.
As far as I can see, you are the first to make that extrapolation.

However, if scholars publish their research under a
Wikimedia-compatible license, that allows anyone (scholar or not) to
move those articles (or, more commonly, parts thereof, especially
images and multimedia) to Wikimedia platforms, as long as the
communities there accept that. It seems they do - currently, there are
over 20k files from OA sources on Wikimedia Commons, of which 6k are
used a total of 66k times across 300 other Wikimedia projects (cf.
http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/glamorous.php?doit=1&category=Open+access+%28publishing%29&use_globalusage=1&ns0=1&depth=5&projects[wikipedia]=1&projects[wikimedia]=1&projects[wikisource]=1&projects[wikibooks]=1&projects[wikiquote]=1&projects[wiktionary]=1&projects[wikinews]=1&projects[wikivoyage]=1&projects[wikispecies]=1&projects[mediawiki]=1&projects[wikidata]=1&projects[wikiversity]=1
),
and together, those 66k pages get over a million page views per day
(except on Saturdays; cf.
http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/baglama.php?group=Open+access+%28publishing%29&date=201310
), which means considerable exposure for the underlying research
topics. Naturally, works not published under Wikimedia-compatible
licenses are not affected.

Besides, PLOS Computational Biology rarely publishes review articles,
and apart from RNA Biology (which has a manuscript track that also
generates Wikipedia articles, but separate from the manuscripts), it
currently is the only scholarly journal to publish articles destined
for any Wikipedia, which means we are on new ground here, where
explosive growth is not to be expected.

Daniel