Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-15/Op-ed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"It is heavily ironic that two decades after the World Wide Web was started—largely to make it easier to share scholarly research—most of our past and present research publications are still hidden behind paywalls for private profit. The bitter twist is that the vast majority of this research is publicly funded, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide each year. This has placed Wikipedia in an awkward position with respect to its verifiability policy: 'all material in Wikipedia mainspace, including everything in articles, lists and captions, must be verifiable [so that] people reading and editing the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source.' Combined with the policy on identifying reliable sources, the paywall dilemma faced by editors and readers becomes clearer: 'many Wikipedia articles rely on scholarly material. When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources.' Not only this, none of the academic journals most cited on the English Wikipedia is open access (PLOS ONE breaks the drought at No. 22 on that list). While WP:PAYWALL advises: 'Do not reject sources just because they are hard or costly to access'. Commenting on a draft proposal that Wikipedia articles should preferentially cite open-access literature, one editor wrote that 'verifiability isn't an option if people are expected to pay in excess of $20 to view a single article ... over closed- or toll-access resources of equivalent scholarly quality'. That draft proposal—started in 2007 when the English Wikipedia was half its current age—died quietly like so many. But what if we could just mark references as being open, rather than preferentially citing them over closed ones? WikiProject Open Access is currently exploring the options, and the Workgroup on Open Access Metadata and Indicators (OAMI) at the National Information Standards Organization has been working on a set of recommendations for how to provide information about the use and re-use rights of scholarly articles. A draft version was released last week, and public comments are invited until 4 February. These recommendations boil down to two metadata tags  [1] <free_to_read>, which signals whether and when a publication is available publicly without a requirement for payment or registration, and [2] <license_ref>, which points to a stable place on the web containing the licensing terms applicable to that publication. The recommendations don't include: a definition of the term open access; specifications as to which licensing terms would be acceptable, or whether and how they should be version-controlled; and suggestions for icons that may be suitable for signalling the content of the proposed tags. Similar recommendations have been put forward in a more broadly scoped draft report from Jisc, the UK body that supports senior-high-school and higher education. The draft had been was released for public comment in September, and its final version is still being worked on. A related report from the Confederation of Open Access Repositories looked at components of license clauses in use by scholarly publishers.  One of the organisations involved in the NISO Workgroup is CrossRef, which is working on including the proposed tags into their metadata and making that information available through their API, in collaboration with the Directory of Open Access Journals. The Open Article Gauge, developed by Cottage Labs with support from the Public Library of Science (PLOS), already provides article-level information about licensing terms for a subset of the scholarly literature; PL