John's draft. Some refinement needed.
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== Title ideas ==
* Continuing our Panel Discussion: How can you write an open access encyclopedia in a closed access world?
==Summary==
* John G. Dove, whose efforts with Credo Reference pointed the way to the establishment of the Wikipedia Library program, reflects on Wikipedia's complex connections to the Open Access Publishing movement.
==Body==
I was glad to join the panel discussion last week at the Wikimedia Foundation organized by Peter Forsyth of Wikistrategies. Below is an elaboration of many of the points I was glad to insert into this conversation.
By way of reference:
* http://wikistrategies.net/oa-wikipedia-panel/
* http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1745
Jake Orlowitz and Alex Stinson re Wikipedia Library project arrangement with Elsevier
I also highly recommend to anyone new to the Open Access world, as I am, a close reading of Peter Suber’s book, [http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/openaccess/Suber_05_toc.html Open Access], now available on an open access basis from MIT Press.
I have been delighted to see Jake Orlowitz and others move forward with finding ways for the Foundation to provide members of the Wikimedia community access to otherwise restricted content. Credo Reference back in 2010 was the first pay-walled resource provider (in our case of an online aggregation of subject encyclopedias which was as big as Wikipedia but 100% from what even Wikipedia would characterize as “reliable sources”). Our motivations were entirely to create good public relations. Our lead investor, Bela Hatvany (founder of two library companies, CLSI in the 70s and Silverplatter in the 80s) was fond of the expression, “A competitor is just someone you’ve not learned how to collaborate with yet.” In his view the main objective of a company or organization should be to provide value to their customers so that they experience themselves as well-served by being your customer. So, while Wikipedia, in some people’s eyes, would be seen as a competitor (and one which had by all measures ‘won the battle’ for the attention of users in need of online reference), I have always been of the view that they were an important player in the lives of our customers and their users, and that we should find ways to collaborate with them. We did not expect any quid pro quo regarding citations from Wikipedia to Credo Reference, though we did occasionally look at whether there was any growth in such references. It was also important, to my way of thinking, to realize that when you think about any group of Wikipedia editors you recognize that you don’t really know who they might be in their non-Wikipedian lives. The 400 prolific editors we provided access to were people that are passionate about creating good encyclopedia entries for the benefit of all. Having such people think well of Credo was important even if we never knew who they were specifically.
A key point in [http://wikistrategies.net/oa-wikipedia-panel/ Wednesday night’s forum] was that raised by Michael Eisen as to whether or not Elsevier would gain more from this relationship than Wikipedia would. I think Elsevier’s goals in this arrangement are entirely PR benefits. It allows them to assert their support for openness. They, too, want scientists to think well of them. They even have open access journals that they’ll want to promote. I don’t think the bits of traffic they might get from this arrangement would have entered into their calculations about this at all. And certainly, as Michael Eisen asserts, it does not represent any potential loss of revenue that might have come from those 45 Wikipedian editors.
For Wikipedia, I think the goals regarding content and links should be driven by what best serves their users. Anything that increases Wikipedian editors’ access to pay-walled material is, in my opinion, a positive. Another program of Wikipedia with libraries has been to encourage libraries to designate selected Wikipedian editors as ‘visiting scholars’ who can thereby be given access to pay-walled content within those libraries (including Science Direct). Having access to the content without a blind-spot hiding pay-walled content from their view should improve Wikipedia entries independent of whether or not pay-walled sources are cited. Access to that literature can increase an editor’s understanding of a field even if the article is not cited by the article. I’m personally of the opinion that there are certain pay-walled sources which should be cited in a good encyclopedia entry so that the user can know of their existence and assess the reliability of claims in the Wikipedia article.
Michael Eisen raised an interesting point about cases where ‘reliable sources’ for a particular assertion in an article are fungible and could equally be supported by open resources as well as pay-walled sources. Jay Jordan (former CEO of OCLC) was fond of saying “Discovery Without Delivery is a Disservice to Users.” This is a good principle. Unless there is a compelling reason to back up assertions by a pay-walled source, an equally reliable open source should be used. Providing references to sources which all readers can access is simply a better user experience. It’s important to point out that Wikipedia as an encyclopedia is tertiary content and need not follow requirements of academic publishing regarding giving credit to original sources. So I agree with Michael Eisen about this point.
However, Michael’s suggestion that Elsevier will gain materially from links to sources in Science Direct is, in my opinion, not only wrong, but runs the risk of taking our eyes off what I think the battle for open access can best be served by at this point. Here’s why I think this.
The pay-walled business model for scholarly communication is based on a fact first made clear to me by a comment that Jan Velterop said to me at a conference (lost to memory) back in 1998 when he was managing director of Academic Press and I was president of Silverplatter. He said, “Each and every scholarly article is its own little monopoly.” It’s one of those comments that has stuck with me ever since. It is the core problem which both the so-called Gold and Green paths to Open Access address. Elsevier does not need traffic from Wikipedia to shore up their pay-walled business model products. The pay-walled business model succeeds by exploiting monopoly control of a sufficient portion of scholarly articles to allow the owners of such products to set whatever prices they want. The vast majority of their customers simply have to pay. The buyer has almost no market power or legitimate alternatives.
The Open Access world has made enormous strides on addressing this problem. I salute those achievements—they represent significant progress on the economics of academic publishing in coming years. But what is the current state of those economics? I was reminded of it, viscerally, just this week.
I had dinner with a chief librarian at a major research university. He reported to me his university back in 2004 had an annual subscription budget of $8 million. This year the price for that same set of subscriptions (without any substantive increase in the number of journals) is $14.4 Million. This is an average price increase of 5.5%, more than double the inflation rate in those years.
Gold OA publishers (now something like 13% of all scholarly journals) are completely open upon publication. Publishers like PLOS provide a clear and successful “existence proof” that a non-monopoly publishing system for academic research can work. In fact most pay-walled publishers, perhaps to hedge their bets or to compete with PLOS, are offering their own Open Access journals.
But at the same time there’s a real lag in adoption of the Green path by which scholars archive a version of an article published in a pay-walled journal so that it’s accessible to all. Now 78% of scholarly publishers worldwide [http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php] give some form of blanket permission for authors to archive a version of their articles in an accessible place and even the 22% that don’t can be pressured to allow such archiving.
Both Green and Gold depend upon the understanding that the broad populations of scholars have of the issues: Green so that they archive papers they’ve already written or continue to submit to pay-walled journals, and Gold so they know that they have excellent choices of where to publish and can reasonably choose Gold OA publishers in the future.
So here is what I think is an opportunity Gold Open Access publishers and Wikipedia both have available to them. It’s my mantra these days: you both have lists of important experts in their fields. These are the referenced sources in your articles. And you have a way to get their individual attention. Each of these referenced sources are an opportunity to educate an expert about the issues related to openness. It is said that there are three times you can capture the attention of an academic researcher:
* When they are trying to get a paper published
* When they are trying to show to others (e.g. tenure committees, colleagues, in-laws) that their work is influential
* When someone important to them recognizes their work (e.g. cites or comments about their work).
So both Gold OA publishers and Wikipedia have an asset which they can deploy in an effort to educate scholars about Open Access:
* OA Publishers: the referenced sources of articles you are about to publish were written by experts in your field-of-publication. That’s why they’re being referenced. You have advance news about the fact that they are about to be referenced. This is sufficiently newsworthy that a scholar is likely to open that e-mail (rather than all the spams they get regularly from people trying to get their attention). You can use this message to:
** Put them in touch with your new article’s author [two publishers I know already do this.]
**If you know their referenced article is not yet open, you could advocate that they deposit it in an archive, even giving them guidance on whom to turn to for help
** Alert them to the benefits (more downloads, more citations) of opening up their article
** Advocate that the next time they write an article they might consider your journal
* Wikipedia: Your references to authors are now gaining in importance to them. There may be ways in which authors already know of the fact that they are being linked to from Wikipedia. But I think the Openness agenda could be well-served by Wikipedia (an idea first raised to me by some Wikipedians themselves) if someone could mine Wikipedia for the most referenced sources which could be opened but are still closed. Imagine a “Leader Board” which called out the scholars with the most references in Wikipedia which have not been made open.
So coming back to the question of links from Wikipedia to Elsevier sources. I point out that such links are, yes, links to Elsevier. But they are also a connection to scholars, many of whom are in need of education about Open Access. I say, bring on lots of those links (where the sources serve the content need of Wikipedia) and then organize an effort to make those sources open.
Another ally in this use of referenced sources may be a growing number of university presses. The librarian I spoke to this week is one of the 30% of head librarians who are also responsible for their university’s press. This means that these presses are right at the point of pain where the monopoly pricing practices of pay-walled scholarly publishing hits the university. This year when my librarian friend went to get his budget increased to cover the $800K price increases from subscription journals, the president of the university said he’d have to present this increase request to the faculty senate so that the faculty would know (for the first time apparently) the impact of the scholarly publishing system on the budget of the university. The university press was included in that budget presentation to provide an educational piece on Open Access. These university presses, like the Gold OA publishers, have a self-interest in converting scholars one-by-one to the open access business models. Some are now running scholarly publishing offices that, among other things, work with researchers to assess their c.v.’s and find opportunities to open up articles they’ve authored.
If these three groups, Gold Open Access publishers, Wikipedians, and university presses can actively seek out ways to motivate individual scholars regarding archiving and publishing then 10 years from now the head of libraries I met with this week will be able to go to the faculty senate and report on year-on-year savings rather than asking for huge budget increases due to automatic monopoly-based price increases. Let’s find ways to assess accessibility of references, build tools that can automate the process of finding and pinging authors of important pay-walled sources, and transform the economics of scholarly publishing to the benefit of science and scholarship.
''[[User:JGDove99|John G. Dove]], Purdue University Press Management Advisory Board''
== Notes ==
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