Themes/Open Scholarship - Wikimania 2014 in London

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. Wikimedia is one of the most visited online resources in the world. It gets over 500 million monthly unique visitors to its sites, including Wikipedia ... Open access is the practise of making scholarly research freely available to the world. Wikimedia shares a similar mission: to provide 'the sum of all human knowledge'^[1] free to anyone with the means to access the internet. This shared goal is something that will be explored at Wikimania 2014. We believe that the open access community and the Wikimedia community have a lot to offer each other, and by working together we can help open up the world's knowledge.  Availability of research is not just about accessibility, but also discoverability. Scholarly articles which are cited in Wikipedia get more traffic and more citations. By adding more references in Wikipedia to open access articles, we can not only increase the spread of this knowledge but perhaps encourage people to read more academic work ... There are initiatives on various Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, to improve coverage of open access topics and increase re-use of open access materials. WikiProjects are hubs to organise a community in Wikipedia that is interested in a subject. WikiProject Open Access is the main hub for projects related to open access, such as the Open Access Media Importer which adds media files from open access journal articles to Wikimedia Commons.  The Signalling OA-ness project is working on finding a good way to mark up whether Wikipedia references are open access or not. Ideally this project will produce a way of 'signalling open access' which can be used much more widely than just within Wikipedia (and will be compliant with a soon-to-be introduced NISO standard for Open Access Metadata and Indicators). A working prototype is being funded by the Open Society Foundations and will be presented at Wikimania 2014 ..."