Why Wikipedia + Open Access = Revolution | MIT Technology Review

"There is a quiet revolution occurring in the way science diffuses into the public consciousness. One of the most significant aspects of this is Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia that has rapidly become the first port of call for anyone researching more or less any scientific subject. But there’s a problem. Many of the world’s highest quality and highest impact journals sit behind expensive paywalls that prevent all but the most privileged and well-resourced from gaining access. So it wouldn’t be at all surprising if Wikipedia editors tended to ignore these high quality papers in favor of articles that were easier to access. That raises an important question. Do Wikipedia entries really reflect the best scientific evidence available? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Misha Teplitskiy and pals at the University of Chicago who have worked out what constitutes an important paper in the world of science and then checked to see whether this is reflected in the references that appear in Wikipedia entries. Teplitskiy and co begin by analyzing the citation patterns in over 4,000 peer-reviewed journals in 26 different research fields ranging from dentistry and medicine through physics and astronomy to psychology and the social sciences. That allowed them to identify the most heavily used journals with the greatest impact factors. Crucially, they also worked out which of these were paid-for journals and which were open access. They then studied articles in the 50 largest Wikipedias to find out where the references point. For example they looked at over 300,000 cite-journal tags in the English Wikipedia alone. The results make for interesting reading. 'The odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to closed access journals,' say Teplitskiy and co. But this doesn’t imply that Wikipedia editors are blindly choosing open access articles at the expense of more important papers. The team says that a journal’s high impact status also significantly increases the chances that it will be referenced, regardless of whether it is open or closed access. So Wikipedia generally provides links to high quality scientific articles, even though open access ones are disproportionately represented ..."