Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-21/Op-ed

Discuss this story

"Nevertheless, when given a choice between journals of highly similar impact factors, Wikipedia editors are significantly more likely to select the “open access” option." - this ignores the probably very high proportion of Wikipedia editors who don't have that choice because they only have access to open access publications. Don't assume all editors have US university subscriptions - they don't. Johnbod (talk) 18:19, 25 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent point. In most cases it's availability, not a conscious choice to use a particular type of source. Gamaliel (talk) 18:29, 25 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Can confirm it's true - I am using whatever pops up first in Google search. Renata (talk) 23:23, 25 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Which is one of a number of reasons I think the community ought to be doing a lot more to promote and expand WP:RX and the WikiProject Resource Exchange at large. Snow ^{let's rap} 00:45, 26 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A WP:SYSTEMIC. Widefox; talk 09:42, 26 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The real evil here is removing citations. It is very rare for us truly to have a glut of them; we should want people to be able to do thorough research from this beginning.

Open access, and in particular genuinely open licensing i.e. PLOS, is indeed compatible with the Wikipedia mission and sources that all readers can follow to look up are obviously more useful than those they cannot; but needlessly deleting our content (including our reference citations) is no path to open anything. Wnt (talk) 12:33, 27 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Can one do a regression with open-access and impact factor, and see how they are related? Are we quoting lower impact factor journals which are open-access? This could be because they are more accessible. That is not exactly a good thing. And yes WP:RX is great thing. Kingsindian ♝♚ 03:34, 31 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You also have the case where an article was published in a closed-access journal, but a pre-publication draft was made available by the authors on their university's (or other) webserver. And sometimes a claim is supported by just the abstract of a closed-access article. The former could be analysed if the link in wikipedia points to the free version, but it would be hard to determine how often the latter occurs. Pelagic (talk) 18:33, 7 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]