A report on open-access issues in Wikipedia, Wikimedia and the "seismic shift" towards open-access research publication, has just been published in the weekly newsletter The Signpost.

The most obvious issue is: what to cite. Although there's some natural pressure towards citing open-access sources in Wikipedia just because that's what its editors can easily find, Wikipedia doesn't discriminate against closed sources. However, there's been talk of using a lock icon to distinguish more clearly between open and closed sources. It's not obvious to me that that's a distinction that can always be made easily: for instance, when the New York Times allows anyone to read a certain number of articles per month but then switches to a pay-per-view model for readers who exceed that limit, is it open access or not?

Additionally, although most discussions of open access focus on whether people can read publications without having to pay an access fee or a subscription fee, there's another issue the report brings up: licensing conditions for reuse. If papers are published under a sufficiently liberal Creative Commons license, their text and figures can be reused within Wikipedia (with proper attribution), and vice versa. But there are subtle issues here involving compatibility of different variations of the licenses.




Comments:

itman:
2012-05-15T04:53:39Z

If papers are published under a sufficiently liberal Creative Commons license, their text and figures can be reused within Wikipedia (with proper attribution), and vice versa. But there are subtle issues here involving compatibility of different variations of the licenses.

I guess it is always possible to re-phrase the text (with a proper citation), but graphs cannot be re-used that easily.