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;Researchers - are you Wikipedia-compatible?
;Announcement – QRpedia donated to Wikimedia UK


[[File:Arthrobacter_arilaitensis_Re117_genome.png|thumb|200px|right|An openly licensed image of the Arthrobacter arilaitensis Re117 genome atlas]]
[[File:Bees for Development QRpedia code plaque.jpg|thumb|200px|right|A QRpedia code in situ in Monmouth, Wales]]


''This post was written by Wikimedia UK Associate, Dr Martin Poulter''
Wikimedia UK is pleased to announce that Roger Bamkin and Terence Eden are transferring ownership of QRpedia to Wikimedia UK.


The first of April this year is a significant date for researchers here in the UK. It’s when a [http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2012news/Pages/120716.aspx new policy comes into place], beginning a journey towards open access (OA) for publicly funded research.
As a donation from Roger and Terence, the intellectual property in QRpedia and the qrpedia.org and qrwp.org domains will be transferred to Wikimedia UK, which will maintain and support the development of the QRpedia platform for the future for the benefit of the Wikimedia community. Roger and Terence will act as honorary advisors to Wikimedia UK in this, as well as retaining their moral rights of attribution, but will not receive any financial consideration for this. The transfer of the domains will take place as soon as the remaining legal details have been resolved.
This is a top-down policy from the Government (via the [http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/ 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 “[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Spring 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 [http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/era-communication-towards-better-access-to-scientific-information_en.pdf announced its own OA policy]. Just in the last few weeks the White House [http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research announced a new policy] to make the reports of taxpayer-funded research openly available.
QRpedia is a web tool that uses QR codes placed on or near objects or locations to link mobile users to Wikipedia articles about those objects or locations in their language. The agreement was made as a result of negotiations at our board meeting on 8 February 2013.


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.
Wikimedia UK is grateful for this donation which will allow ongoing technical support for a number of Wikimedia-related outreach projects where QRpedia is already in use, including Wikimedia UK’s work with the Derby Museum and Monmouthpedia, and many others worldwide.


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.
Chris Keating, Chair of Wikimedia UK, said: “I am very pleased that we have reached agreement with Roger and Terence and that Wikimedia UK will support, preserve and improve QRpedia for the benefit of the whole Wikimedia community. QRpedia is a great innovation and already plays an important role in Wikimedia outreach projects not just in the UK but worldwide. I look forward to working with Roger and Terence to develop QRpedia further in future.”


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?
Roger Bamkin, co-creator of QRpedia, said: “Terence Eden and I are thrilled to see the projects in Monmouth, Johannesburg, Gibraltar, Sayada and Fremantle that have inspired volunteers to write about different towns in dozens of different languages. Who would think you could tour Monmouth in Hungarian or Gibraltar in Punjabi?” <span class="plainlinks">[http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2013/04/announcement-qrpedia-donated-to-wikimedia-uk/<nowiki>[</nowiki>...<nowiki>]</nowiki>]</span>
 
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 15:25, 2 April 2013

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