Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Whynotoa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"We are sometimes (often in fact) asked questions like, 'Why are you partnering with closed-access, for-profit journals? Aren't you making a devil's bargain? Aren't you perpetuating the toll access system? Don't paywalled references prevent our readers who can't verify the content? Isn't this against the verifiability policy? Aren't you tainting our mission of sharing knowledge by supporting or preferring or endorsing these very profitable publishing gatekeepers?' Those are great questions, and definitely a valuable critique of our work. We, too, think it's sad that we have ask for donations and sell Wikipedia's value as a portal to publishers. On the other hand, we have our legions of readers and when they come to Wikipedia they will see the content we have summarized in a free format from sources. These critiques question whether that content is from full-text-freely-available-online-sources only, or from all of the best sources regardless of their ease-of-access status. Our library role in the Wikimedia Community requires two different approaches to creating access: FIRST, in the short term, we have to serve our readers and editors as best we can and that means giving them as much access to the best research as possible today. Collaboration with publishers is a compromise with mutual benefit: we'd rather have our editors summarize paywalled content for our readers than for that content to not be represented on Wikipedia at all, even if readers may hit a paywall when they click-through. We are also looking forward to a world in which knowledge is more truly free (including the sources and data underlying it), but meanwhile, we have an encyclopedia with 500 million monthly readers to write. In 2013 our medical pages alone were viewed 4.8 billion times. We cannot just wait for the publishing industry to transform, we also have readers who are coming to and relying on us today ... SECOND, in the long term, the Wikipedia Library creates another Wikimedia tool that can encourage the publishing landscape to move towards more open access. Without our direct request, some of our partners have asked us to support the growing Open Access opportunities tied to their donations:Elsevier asked us to mark their citations with 'may require a subscription', precisely because some of it is switching to a free-after-x-months model.JSTOR permits readers to access 6 articles per month for free, just like the New York Times ..."