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The Wikipedia Library
Books & Bytes
Issue 13, August–September 2015
by The Interior, Ocaasi, Sadads, and Nikkimaria

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In this issue of Books & Bytes, we're happy to announce some new partnerships, branches, coordinators, and news. August and September have seen some new partnerships, lots of new coordinators, progress on new branches of TWL, and a spirited public discussion of our Elsevier partnership and Open Access (see "Spotlight").

New accounts

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English resources

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  • EBSCO — expansive academic and popular databases. The pilot includes three databases: Academic Search Complete, Business Source Complete, and MasterFILE Complete.
  • Newspaperarchive.com — multinational online database of digitized newspapers (1000 accounts)
  • IMF eLibrary — periodicals, studies, ebooks, and statistical tools related to economics and international trade (50 accounts)
  • Sabinet— full text South and Southern African journals (10 accounts)

Global resources

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  • Al Manhal (in Arabic) — major Arabic provider of full-text electronic journals, theses and ebooks (60 accounts)
  • Jamalon (in Arabic) — physical Arabic and English books on a variety of topics (50 editors)
  • Numérique Premium — French-language aggregator of ebooks in the humanities and social sciences (100 accounts)

New global branches

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We are very excited to announce two more global Wikipedia Library branches:

Conferences: IFLA, PKP, and Upcoming Events: Frankfurt, Arabic Publishers, and more

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In August, we had been hoping to attend the biggest gathering of international librarians in the world: the International Federation of Library Associations Conference in Cape Town (see the conference website). We couldn't send one of our paid staff, so we reached out to Wikipedian and president of Wikimedia South Africa, User:Discott, to facilitate our presence there. It was a great conference, with conversations with a number of interested library networks ranging from one of the leaders in the Namibian library's community, Catalan libraries community, and research libraries in the United States, among many others. We also brought Alex Stinson (User:Astinson (WMF)/Sadads) in via video call to talk with a number of leading thinkers in the libraries policy community. As an outcome of that meeting, he is working with the IFLA community to create a set of guidelines and case studies that can help national and library network create strategies for using Wikipedia as part of information literacy, research, and the library community's digital infrastructure.

Patrick (User:The Interior/User:PEarley (WMF)) attended the Public Knowledge Project's biannual International Scholarly Publishing Conference in Vancouver, B.C., as it was close to home for him. PKP, led by John Willinsky and supported by Simon Fraser University, seeks to provide researchers and publishers with the open-source software they need to easily publish open accessible academic content. See some of the PKP projects here.

We want to engage a global audience of librarians: if you know of a library or publishing conference near you, let us know at wikipedialibrary@wikimedia.org, and we can help you figure out how to attend and give tips, strategies and sample outreach materials for engaging librarians and publishers to help the Wikimedia community.

Upcoming events

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  • ARL annual meeting - Association of Research Libraries, Alex will be attending the meeting because it happily coincides with WikiConference USA, and we have received considerable interest in engaging their network in contributing to Wikipedia's citations and references.
  • WikiConference USA - Alex will be attending to present on trends that we are noticing in different parts of the global editors communities, moreover, he will be supporting a presentation on a collaboration we have been working on with the Internet Archive, and generally looking for new library collaboration projects to document. If you are attending, and would like to learn more about the Wikipedia Library, let him know!
  • Frankfurt Book Fair - Jake will be attending with Saehrimnir, Samwalton9, Kippelboy, Achim Raschka, UweRohwedder, and Veronika Krämer (WMDE). The attendance is in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland, with the goal of finding more publishing partners for both The Wikipedia Library publisher donation program and for WMDE's litstip program.
  • Arab Publishing Conference - We will be sending volunteer Mohamed Ouda to this year's Arabic Publishing Conference in November in the UAE, in hopes to grow opportunities with the Arabic publishing community.

New volunteer coordinators

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TWL is pleased to welcome thirteen new coordinators:

We always need volunteers to help coordinate account distribution or perform other tasks. This role takes only 1–2 hours of work a week, and brings with it the satisfaction of connecting writers and researchers with the resources they need (and the occasional barnstar from happy recipients!). If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, sign up here.

Spotlight: Two Perspectives on Open Access and the Wikimedia Movement

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Writing an open access encyclopedia in a closed access world - TWL's perspective

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This month Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, announced its recent partnership with the Wikipedia Library—a program that helps editors access reliable sources to improve Wikipedia. The collaboration gave 45 ScienceDirect accounts to Wikipedia volunteers, to use the database’s scholarly literature for research when writing and editing the encyclopedia. The announcement led to a valuable and constructive conversation about open access and the Wikimedia movement. (Originally published on the Wikimedia Blog)

Wikipedia editors receive free access to content through more than 40 partnerships with publishers in many different fields through a program called the Wikipedia Library. These partnerships allow editors to use otherwise restricted content to improve Wikipedia and to share that knowledge with the public. In order to make this possible, the Wikipedia Library often partners with organizations that haven’t fully embraced the open access movement, and Wikipedia’s editors then add links to their restricted content. As part of a movement committed to open knowledge, why does the Wikipedia Library do this?

First, in the short term, the Wikipedia Library has to serve our readers and editors as best we can, and that means giving them as much access as possible to the best research today. Collaboration with publishers is a compromise: editors summarize paywalled content for our readers, sharing information on Wikipedia that may otherwise never be represented. Citations to these resources do create greater visibility for those publishers, but Wikipedia editors are in no way required to cite them and are encouraged to use open-access sources as well.

While we eagerly await the day when all of the world’s knowledge is truly free, Wikipedia's volunteer editors need a foundation of high-quality research to create and curate articles for the site's hundreds of millions of readers each month, even if that research is sometimes behind a paywall. Editors have received nearly 5,000 accounts from the Wikipedia Library’s partners, and have enriched thousands of articles with their content. Having access to good sources, regardless of whether they are open access, provides an essential tool for ensuring Wikipedia reflects the most current and accurate information.

Whenever an editor cites a partner's paywalled source, we expect that they include thorough original citation information, including an indicator of any access restrictions, and a link to the version of the content on the partner's site. These citations allow a reader to track down the version that is most accessible to them.

Unfortunately limited or restricted access is common in today’s research climate. The best research materials may be behind paywalled online holdings or in expensive print journals and monographs. Wikipedia editors will use closed access materials if they are the best sources for advancing our mission of sharing knowledge. As Wikipedian Martin Poulter explained: Wikipedia aims to be an open-access summary of all reliable knowledge—not a summary of only open-access knowledge.

Second, in the long term, we believe that the Wikipedia Library's work with publishers encourages the publishing community to explore more open-access strategies that share their content with the world. It's a gradual opening, but citations on Wikipedia bring public attention to paywalled sources, raising demand for easier public access.

Some of our partners have asked us to support access opportunities tied to their donations as well. Newspapers.com encouraged Wikipedia editors to use their "clippings" function, which allows subscribers to turn articles into fair-use, free-to-read webpages, so that they are available to readers without an account. Another partner, Newspaperarchive.com, followed their example by building a similar tool. These changes grow out of the significant pressure that the open-access and scholarly communities have placed on publishers to improve accessibility.

We contribute to this evolution by actively seeking collaboration and support from the open knowledge movement's biggest advocates: universities, libraries, archives, and the network of organizations that support open-access efforts. Our collaborations with OCLC, SPARC, OA Button, CrossRef, Internet Archive, and Digital Public Library of America allow us to further the dissemination of library and open resources. Using our growing network we help communicate the important shift towards open-access resources.

We will continue raising the profile of open-access projects. The efforts of the Wikipedia Library advance our common mission, and are complementary to the vision of full open access that we also wholeheartedly support.

Third, we’re still looking for ways to improve the ways in which we share free and open information with the world. Wikipedia is a work in progress and needs the help of a diverse community of collaborators to take further action. We have ideas about improving the impact of open access on Wikipedia, but we need your help to realize them:

  • Wikipedia can better communicate to editors the importance of open access (OA) as a way for editors to access reliable and scholarly sources while improving the experience of sharing knowledge for readers.
  • Wikipedia editors need more support in finding and identifying OA sources, pointing out the availability of OA within donated publisher resources, providing links to pre-publication or open repository versions of published research where available, or including 'see also' links for closely related OA works.
  • Scholars can create more research initiatives that measure the dynamics between Wikipedia and peer-reviewed literature in terms of impact on editors and readers.
  • Developers can experiment with new tools for Wikipedia readers to find the latest OA research for Wikipedia entries on emerging topics and incorporate full-text discovery services like the Open Access Button, even integrating them as a search tool next to each paywalled reference.
  • The Wikipedia Library can try to arrange free access for all incoming Wikipedia traffic to paywalled articles, or at least an extended preview or open access excerpts for the versions we cite.
  • There are likely many more opportunities, and we need you to share those ideas with the community (please do so through email, or on Wikipedia).


This October, we'll be co-hosting a global virtual editathon with SPARC to improve our coverage of open access topics on Wikipedia. We would love that you participate. We want more collaborations that engage the community in exploring these issues together with us.

Open-access content on Wikipedia is very important to us, because Wikipedia itself is an open knowledge project. For the longevity and sustainability of Wikipedia, it's important that the public engage in debates around open access and have a nuanced understanding of the evolving state of access to knowledge. Today we have an encyclopedia to write, but as open access is increasingly embraced we are and will be advocating for it right alongside you. --Jake Orlowitz & Alex Stinson

Wikipeevedia - An Open Access advocate's perspective

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Originally published by Michael Eisen on September 23, 2015 on his blog under a CC-BY. Eisen is a cofounder of the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and an advocate for more open access publishing in academia

A couple of weeks ago I unintentionally set off a bit of a firestorm regarding Wikipedia, Elsevier and open access. I was scanning my Twitter feed, as one does, and came upon a link to an Elsevier press release:

Elsevier access donations help Wikipedia editors improve science articles: With free access to ScienceDirect, top editors can ensure that science read by the public is accurate

I read the rest of it, and found that Elsevier and Wikipedia (through the Wikipedia Library Access Program) had struck a deal whereby 45 top (i.e. highly active) Wikipedia editors would get free access to Elsevier’s database of science papers – Science Direct – for a year, thereby “improving the encyclopedia and bringing the best quality information to the public.”

I have some substantive issues with this arrangement, as I will detail below. But what really stuck in my craw was the way that several members of the Wikipedia Library were used not just to highlight the benefits of the deal to Wikipedia and its users, but to serve as mouthpieces for misleading Elsevier PR, such as this:

Elsevier publishes some of the best science scholarship in the world, and our globally located volunteers often seek out that access but don’t have access to research libraries. Elsevier is helping us bridge that gap!

It was painful to hear people from Wikipedia suggesting that Elsevier is coming to the rescue of people who don’t have access to the scientific literature! In reality, Elsevier is one of the primary reasons they don’t have access, having fought open access tooth and nail for two decades and spent millions of dollars to lobby against almost any act anywhere that would improve public access to science. And yet here was Wikipedia – a group that IS one of the great heroes of the access revolution – publicly praising Elsevier for providing access to 0.0000006% of the world’s population.

Furthermore, I found the whole idea that this is a “donation” is ridiculous. Elsevier is giving away something that costs them nothing to provide – they just have to create 45 accounts. It’s extremely unlikely that the Wikipedia editors in question were potential subscribers to Elsevier journals or that they would pay to access individual articles. So no revenue was lost. And in exchange for giving away nothing, Elsevier almost certainly increases the number of links from Wikipedia to their papers – something of significant value to them.

I was fairly astonished to see this, and, being somewhat short-tempered, I fired off a series of tweets:

shocked to see @wikipedia working hand-in-hand with Elsevier to populate encylopedia w/links people cannot access t.co/qXBpZfOfLo
— Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) September 10, 2015
  1. Irony is Elsevier crowing about “donating” access to @wikipedia editors, while denying access to most of its users t.co/qXBpZfOfLo
— Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) September 11, 2015

These tweets struck a bit of a nerve, and the reaction, at least temporarily, seemed to pit #openaccess advocates against Wikipedians – as highlighted in a story by Glyn Moody. I in no way meant to do this. It would be hard to find two groups whose goals are more aligned.

So I want to reiterate something I said over and over as these tweets turned into a kind of mini-controversy. In saying I thought that making this deal with Elsevier was a bad idea, I was not in any way trying to criticize Wikipedia or the people who make it work. I love Wikipedia. As a kid who spent hours and hours reading an old encyclopedia my grandparents gave me, I think that Wikipedia is one of the greatest creations of the Internet Age. Its editors and contributors, as well as Jimmy Wales and the many others who made it a reality, are absolute, unvarnished heroes.

In no way do I question the commitment of Wikipedia to open access. I just think they made a mistake here, and I worry about a bit about the impact this kind of deal will have on Wikipedia. But it is a concern born of true love for the institution.

So with that in mind, let me delve into this a bit more deeply.

First of all, I understand completely why Wikipedia make this kind of deal. The mission of Wikimedia 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” [1]. But there is a major challenge to building an accurate and fully-referenced open encyclopedia: much of the source material they need to do this is either not online or is behind paywalls. It’s clear that Wikipedia sees opening source material as the long-term solution to this problem. But in the meantime they feel compelled to ensure that the people who build Wikipedia have a way around paywalls when they are doing so. It’s not all that conceptually different from a university library that works to provide access to paywalled sources to its scholars.

So the question to me isn’t whether Wikipedia should make any deals with publishers. The question is should they have made this deal with this publisher. And just like I have strongly disagreed with deals universities (including my own) routinely make to provide campus access to Elsevier journals, I do not think this deal is good for Wikipedia or the public.

Here are my concerns:

This deal will prolong the life of the paywalled business model

If the only effect of this deal was to provide editors with access, I would hold my nose and support Wikipedia’s efforts to work around the current insane scholarly publishing system. But I don’t think this is the only effect of the deal. In several ways this deal strengthens Elsevier’s subscription publishing business, and strengthening this business is clearly bad for Wikipedia and its mission.

How does it strengthen Elsevier’s business? First, it provides them with good PR – allowing them to pretend that they support openness, something that serves to at least partially blunt the increasingly bad PR their business subscription journal publishing business has incurred in recent years. Second, it provides them with revenue. This deal will increase the number of links in Wikipedia to Elsevier papers, and links on Wikipedia are clearly of great value to Elsevier – they can monetize them in multiple ways: a) by advertising on the landing pages, b) by collecting one-time fees from people without accounts who want to view an article, and, most significantly, c) by increasing traffic to their journals from users with access, which they cite to justify increased payments from universities and other institutions.

Finally, and most significantly, the deal mitigates some of the direct negative consequences of publishing paywalled journals and publishing in paywalled journals. One of the consequences of papers appearing in paywalled journals is that they are less likely to be cited and otherwise used on the Internet and beyond. And, as open resources like Wikipedia grow and grow in importance, this will become more true. This is a potentially powerful force for driving people to publish in a more open way, and, if anything, supporters of openness should be working to amplify this effect. But this deal does the opposite – it significantly dilutes the negative impacts of publishing in Elsevier’s paywalled journals, and thereby almost certainly will help prolong the life of the paywalled journal business model.

I realize that not making this deal would weaken Wikipedia in the short-run. But I am certain it would strengthen it in the long-run by quickening the arrival of a truly open scientific literature, and I think we are all in this for the long-run.

Wikipedia got too little from Elsevier

Even if you accept that this kind of deal has to be made, I think it’s a bad deal. Elsevier got great PR, significant tangible financial benefits, and several clear intangible benefits. An exchange for this, they’ve given away almost nothing. To me this was a missed opportunity related to the framing of this as a “donation”. If you’re asking for a donation, you don’t make demands. But it seems like Wikipedia was in a good position to ask for something that would benefit its readers in a much bigger way, such as Elsevier letting everyone through their paywall when following links from Wikipedia.

I obviously can’t guarantee Elsevier would have agreed to this, and maybe Wikipedia tried to negotiate for more, but it does strike me that Wikipedia undervalued itself with this arrangement.

Will this effect how articles are linked from Wikipedia?

One of the many things I love about Wikipedia is that there is a clear bias in favor of sources that are available for free online to everyone. This is obviously part philosophical – people who put the most time into building Wikipedia are obviously true believers in openness and almost certainly are biased in favor of providing open sources whenever possible. But some of this is also practical. Almost by definition if you can not access a source, you are unlikely (and should not) cite it. You can see this effect clearly in academic scientists who have only a weak bias towards citing open sources because they have access to most papers and don’t think about access when choosing what to cite. I don’t question the commitment of Wikipedians to openness. There are plenty of cases where people cite freely available versions of papers (e.g. preprints) instead of official paywalled versions. I just worry that easy access to paywalled papers will increase the number of times the paywalled version is cited in lieu of others (like free copies in PubMed Central). Obviously, there are ways to mitigate this – bots that check citations and add open ones. But it warrants watching.

And I’m not in any way suggesting that people should systematically reject citing paywalled sources. Sometimes information is fungible – there are many sources that one could cite for a particular fact – but this is obviously not always the case. Clearly for Wikipedia to be successful in the current environment, it has to be based on, and cite, a lot of paywalled sources.

Science journal articles are not like books

Several people have made the comparison between book citations and journal articles. But there are crucial differences. First, there is a real viable alternative to paywalled journals right now, and I would argue that it is in Wikipedia’s interest to support that alternative by not making things too easy for paywalled journals. Unfortunately, the same is not true for books, even academic ones. But even with the generally poor accessibility of books, I wonder if Wikipedians would support a deal with Amazon in which prolific edits got Kindle’s with free access to all Amazon e-books in exchange for providing links to Amazon when the books were cited (this was suggested by someone on Twitter but I can’t find the link)? I doubt it, yet to me this is almost exactly analogous to this Elsevier deal. In any case, the main point is that the situation with books is really bad, but that isn’t a good reason not to make the situation for journal articles better.

Wikipedia rocks

All that said, I hope this issue is behind us. It was painful to see myself being portrayed as a critic of Wikipedia. I am not. I could not love Wikipedia more than I do. I use it every day. It is one of the best advertisements for openness out there, and I can even see an argument that says that if deals with the devil make Wikipedia better, then this benefits openness far more than it hurts it. So let’s just leave it at that. I’ve enjoyed all the conversation about this issue, and I look forward to doing anything I can to make Wikipedia better and better in the future. -- Michael Eisen

Open Access editathon

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TWL and SPARC are partnering to host an Open Access editathon as part of OA Week (October 19th through the 25th). See the project page to participate!

See also

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Announcements
Controversy
Discussion

Bytes in Brief

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Community roundup

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Newsworthy

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Worth reading (or watching)

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