Perfect statement: only one correction: you need to negate the following
phrase...
And, if they are *un*able to read and cite it...
If every country would vote an equivalent law for Free Knowledge, the world
would become a better place to live...
-- Geert Van Pamel
-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Wikimedia-l <[email protected]> Namens Jake Orlowitz
Verzonden: maandag 20 april 2020 22:11
Aan: [email protected]
Onderwerp: [Wikimedia-l] Comment Open on U.S. Open Access Policy
My Letter to the U.S. Office for Science and Technology Policy regarding a
proposal for federally mandate open access to
publicly-funded research...
---
Wikipedia is one of the ten most popular websites in the world. Each month
200,000 editors improve over 6 million articles. This vital public information
is viewed on 1 billion unique devices as our pages are
loaded by people around the globe 7,000 times per second.
Wikipedia is the "free encyclopedia", both in its open CC-BY-SA licensing as
well as the unpaid contributions of its volunteer
editors. Yet Wikipedia's hundreds of thousands of editors struggle to access
scholarly research. And, if they are able to read and
cite it, then hundreds of millions of readers cannot verify or explore it for
deeper research.
Citations are the bridge between Wikipedia articles and a broader landscape of
reliable, secondary sources. Citations not only allow
readers to verify the reliability of the facts they find in Wikipedia; through
citations readers can also deep-dive into any given
topic by exploring the books, scholarly publications, and news stories
referenced in an article.
A recently released dataset of all citations with identifiers in Wikipedia
found that less than half of the official versions of
scholarly publications cited with an identifier in Wikipedia are freely
available on the web. This chasm of for editors and for
readers is a tragedy of public education and digital literacy.
Just look at the most recent global catastrophe with Coronavirus. By April
2020 the main articles on COVID-19 had received 50 million views.
Wikipedia's medical content--made up of more than 155,000 articles and 1
billion bytes of text across more than 255 languages--has
been ranked as one of the top-3 most viewed sources for medical information on
the entire internet.
References are essential to the public's trust in Wikipedia. Indeed,
Wikipedia's medical content is supported by 757,855 references in
English and 1,596,528 in other languages, for a total of 2,354,383 across all
languages. In English 168,985 have a PMID while 261,850
do in other languages. This means at least 430,835 references are journal
articles.
What happens when those journal articles lie behind a paywall? The public
suffers from a dearth of good information to make decisions
about their lives as independent citizens and members of a global community.
As founder of The Wikipedia Library, I arranged partnerships with dozens of
leading scholarly journals, to give Wikipedia editors free
access to their reliable content and so they would be able to do effective and
rigorous research. This time-intensive process took 6
years to amass access to only 1/5th of the most highly regarded academic
publications. Frankly, Wikipedia editors--volunteers who
selflessly give of their intelligence and passion to educate--should not have
to beg and borrow to access publicly-funded research.
Readers should not hit paywalls when they are seeking citizen-supported
knowledge.
I implore you to make the bold but entirely reasonable decision and ensure that
taxpayers have access to the vital scientific and
scholarly studies that they themselves fund. This is not only sensible, it is
essential to civic health, societal progress, and human
flourishing.
Sincerely,
Jake Orlowitz
Founder of The Wikipedia Library
---
"Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code Resulting
From Federally Funded Research"
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/02/19/2020-03189/request-for-information-public-access-to-peer-reviewed-scholarly-publications-data-and-code
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