How many Wikipedia references are available to read? We measured the proportion of open access sources across languages and topics. – Wikimedia Foundation

peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-09-16

Summary:

"Wikipedia’s use of open access sources—publications that can be accessed for free by anyone online[1]—plays a critical role in supporting fact-checking and in fostering digital literacy. Initiatives such as the Wikipedia Library’s partnerships allow editors to gain free access to the paywalled literature, while automated tools such as OAbot help editors find openly accessible versions that can be added to Wikipedia article references. However, Wikipedia does not have policies that explicitly favor open access over subscription-based sources when citing information. In reality, Wikipedia still links both many paywalled and open access sources. How does this affect readers?

We recently released a dataset of all citations with identifiers in Wikipedia. This does not represent every single book, article, and website referenced on Wikipedia (more analysis of that to come), but the substantial subset of sources that have a code that uniquely identifies the work, such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) in the case of academic articles, or an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for books. You might think of this large subset of citations as roughly representing the scholarly sources of Wikipedia. To estimate the proportion of these scholarly sources that are free to read, we are releasing a new dataset that sheds light on these citations by their accessibility level and topic....

We find that less than half of the official versions of scholarly publications cited with an identifier in Wikipedia are freely available on the web:  29% are free-to-read at the source, while an additional 10% have a free-to-read version available elsewhere...."

Link:

https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/08/20/how-many-wikipedia-references-are-available-to-read/

Updated:

09/16/2019, 07:59

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.wikipedia oa.access oa.quality

Date tagged:

09/16/2019, 11:59

Date published:

08/20/2018, 07:59