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[[File: | [[File:Arthrobacter_arilaitensis_Re117_genome.png|thumb|200px|right|An openly licensed image of the Arthrobacter arilaitensis Re117 genome atlas]] | ||
Wikimedia UK | ''This post was written by Wikimedia UK Associate, Dr Martin Poulter'' | ||
The | The first of April this year is a significant date for researchers here in the UK. It’s when a new policy comes into place, beginning a journey towards open access (OA) for publicly funded research. | ||
This is a top-down policy from the Government’s (via the Finch Report), the Research Councils, and other funding bodies, but it follows years of campaigning by a grass-roots movement of academics and librarians. Open Access made headlines last year in what the Guardian dubbed “the Academic Spring”, when many academics started a boycott of journals that lock research papers behind a “paywall”. | |||
The official policy is a huge step forward for open access in the UK, and comes at a time when the European Commission has announced its own OA policy. Just last week the White House announced a new policy to make the reports of taxpayer-funded research openly available. | |||
These developments affect whether the public can access reports of taxpayer-funded research without meeting a paywall. The UK policy affects new research papers, not those already published. It also affects how research is licensed: whether you and I have rights to copy and adapt the text or images of a paper. | |||
However, the open agenda doesn’t stop at access to research results. There is also increasing pressure for public access to the underlying data and for greater openness and transparency around the process of research, for example with standardised information about funding. | |||
Attending an event at the Royal Society recently, there was agreement about the merits of open access, but wide disagreement about the consequences. Will commercial publishers be banished from the academy, or will pay-to-publish mean they charge twice for the same work? Will more scientific papers be published, or fewer? Will learned societies – some of whom support their work with non-open-access journals – go extinct or will they flourish even more? | |||
However, there has been relatively little mention of how this affects Wikimedia (meaning Wikipedia, its sister projects such as Wikiversity, and the communities that support them). For a lot of research, Wikipedia and Wikimedia are a gateway to a huge global audience, including taxpayers who ultimately fund public research, and including academics in poorer countries who are less able to access the original papers. | |||
WIkipedia itself is written, reviewed and illustrated by volunteers. Some of us have day-jobs in universities or research institutions, but for those who don’t, the paywalls lock away content that could really help us improve articles on difficult academic topics. The difficulty of getting the best sources, while so much junk research and opinion is freely accessible, has a dumbing-down effect on the web: Wikipedia seeks to counter that trend, and open access would make that easier for us. <span class="plainlinks">[http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2013/03/know-when-to-oldham/ <nowiki>[</nowiki>Continues...<nowiki>]</nowiki>]</span> | |||
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Revision as of 12:38, 21 March 2013
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Для української мови Вікіпедії ласка, відвідайте http://uk.wikipedia.org; для Вікімедіа Україна відвідайте http://ua.wikimedia.org
For the Ukrainian language Wikipedia please visit http://uk.wikipedia.org; for Wikimedia Ukraine please visit http://ua.wikimedia.org
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