Andrea Zanni started a lovely thread elsewhere asking about how to help the Open Access movement in Italy, with some good replies (below). Forwarding to foundation-l as it is relevant to this list, and linked to recent discussions here about how to fix the sad state of closed journals. [also perhaps appropriate for wikisource, commons, and wikipedia, which all get mentioned as examples for collaborations]
SJ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Daniel Mietchen <daniel.mietc...@googlemail.com> Date: Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 9:36 PM Dear all, thanks for bringing me into this conversation, Melissa. I see a number of areas in which the OA and WMF communities could join forces, and several of these are relevant to the newly approved project. None of these points is specific to Italy or Italian, but although Italian had not been on my radar there yet (basically because I can only understand it, not produce it myself), I agree that addressing them together with existing communities with overlapping interests is a good idea. Let me outline a few: (1) the WMF would benefit from feedback from the OA community on the draft of a WMF policy on OA and open data. It currently exists in two variants - a general mandate modeled after the NIH policy (cf. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Areas_of_interest/Open-access_policy ) and a scheme more cast in terms of practical implementation (cf. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WMF_support ) that takes into account different degrees of WMF support for research projects (a distinction not made at the NIH). (2) both sides would benefit from a broader reuse of OA materials - especially images - on WMF projects. I have collected some basic stats on this at http://species-id.net/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Slides/Reuse-of-OA-on-Wikimedia and think it would be very good to have a simple way of uploading all suitably licensed OA materials to Commons or a sister directory (e.g. http://figshare.com/ or similar). On a related note, the annual image contest at Commons (for latest issue, see http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/29/commons-picture-year-winners-2011/ ) features very few images that came from an OA source (so far, I only found one - http://commons.wikimedia.org/?title=File:Culex_sp_larvae.png ; a finalist in 2007). Having some more systematic approach to getting OA-sourced images featured as picture of the day/ month/ year would certainly be good. (3) the articles on OA and related topics are generally not in a good shape, and typically not even assessed for quality. For the English Wikipedia, I have started building a skeleton for what is to become an overview of what OA-related articles would be desirable to have: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mietchen/OA_catalogue . Turning this into a set of coherent articles will require something like a Task force, even though the most relevant ones do not seem to be very active these days, and there is not much of collaboration in this regard across different WMF projects or even languages. Here, having OA people involved across projects or languages would certainly be beneficial. (4) I think publishers (not just OA ones, actually) would benefit from having a closer look at the RNA families Track at the journal RNA Biology (which is not OA, btw), in which authors are required to submit, for manuscripts reporting on new types of RNA families, the draft for a corresponding Wikipedia article, which will be peer reviewed along with the manuscript (see http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/rnabiology/guidelines/ and search for Wikipedia). Once the paper is published, the Wikipedia article goes live, naturally citing the journal article, thus providing the journal with exposure at a highly visible platform. Similar partnerships are possible with other WMF projects (e.g. http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikispecies:Collaboration_with_ZooKeys_and_PhytoKeys ). (5) I think peer review in any journal (and at funding agencies, but that is another story) would benefit from being conducted in the open (cf. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/473452b ). One possibility here is to post the reviews of accepted papers in public (e.g. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/8/62/prepub ), another to have the manuscript posted in public and to invite public comments along with public formal reviews (e.g. http://www.biogeosciences-discuss.net/4/2959/2007/bgd-4-2959-2007-discussion.html ). This latter approach works only for publishers that accept green OA in some form, but it works best for gold OA. Having some more OA publishers experiment with such a system could, over time, develop into something like "wiki-style" review at Scholarpedia (cf. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Help:Reviewers#Wiki-style_peer-review ), i.e. that reviewers edit the draft directly rather than commenting on it. With such a system in place at (at least some) OA journals, researchers could well be more motivated to contribute to collaborative projects like those run by the WMF (see also the survey at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Expert_participation_survey ). Also related to the issue of motivation: Participants at the recent Open Science Workshop at OAI7 voted "Change the way scientists are evaluated" to the top of the agenda (cf. http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2011-July/000840.html ), and joining forces with WMF (and funders) to get wiki contributions included in the picture of scientific evaluation could well be worthwhile too. Expansion of the approach mentioned in (3) to languages other than English is anticipated (though for the moment only to those three that I can write articles in). For example, for the German Wikimedia chapter's WikiConvention later this year, I have proposed a session in preparation for Open Access Week (cf. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiConvention/Themensammlung#Wikimedia_und_Open_Access ), and this could certainly be coordinated with related activities on the Italian end, or elsewhere. During OA week, one could think of highlighting OA-derived content on WMF projects, or having collaborative writing sessions on OA-related topics, or having prizes for contributions along these lines. Looking forward to further deepening of the discussion, Daniel On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 11:04 PM, Melissa Hagemann <mhagem...@osi-dc.org> wrote: > Hi SJ and Aubrey, > > Wonderful to hear that there is interest in Italy to find ways to bring > together the WMF and OA communities. > < I'm adding Daniel Mietchen to the thread.... For years, I've thought the OA and WMF communities had much in common and we should be doing more to properly introduce the communities and build synergies between them. So perhaps Daniel can help to brainstorm about what more could be done in Italy and then Italy could become an example of what can be accomplished in this area. > > In general, I think that by raising awareness of OA (and specifically the > materials which are freely available through OA) within the WMF community, we > could encourage more OA resources to be used as references in Wikipedia > articles. In addition, Wikimedians could become powerful allies in the OA > movement, helping to make more content freely available through OA, so it > could be used in more WMF projects. > > With regards to Italy, Aubrey, you mentioned that you are in close contact > with many folks working on OA there, so you probably know about these > resources, but I thought it would be helpful to share some info on those I've > worked with in the past as well as current OA projects: > > - Paola Gargiulo (p.gargi...@caspur.it) - you may already know Paola, but I > think she's great and would probably enjoy being part of this conversation. > - Portal for Italian Electronic Scholarly Literature in Institutional > Archives - a service provider to Italian OA scholarly and research content; > collects and provides access to current information on OA in Italy and > abroad http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi > - OA Week Wiki in Italian - > http://wiki.openarchives.it/index.php/Pagina_principale > - OA Mailing list in Italian: > http://openarchives.it/mailman/listinfo/oa-italia > > Excited to see what we can do to make Italy an example of what can be > achieved through collaboration between the OA and WMF communities. > > Best, > Melissa > > Melissa Hagemann > Senior Program Manager > Information Program > Open Society Foundations _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
