On Wednesday 22 February 2012 08:08 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
Journals pose a particular problem as they are often, as in the case of the three journal articles in this case, behind pay walls. Those are peer reviewed, while his book by a commercial publisher has not received academic reviews. Someone did send me a copy of one of the academic journal articles. But I have yet to see the other two which cost quite a bit. Fred
I was a student at really well-resourced US universities for a short part of my life and then spent the rest of it in far flung parts of the third world with little access to the kind of knowledge I had access to while in the US - a situation that continues here in India - and so I particularly identify with the access problem you've raised. Journal corporations like Reed Elsevier and services like JSTOR and Project Muse provide negligibly small entry to non-paying consumers outside their traditional base - rich universities in the US, Europe and a few other parts of the world.
This creates a weird anomaly, reflected - I am sure - on Wikipedia. Open Access journals - and just generally, any knowledge resource whose text is available to see freely on the internet - probably gets far more citation use on Wikipedia and elsewhere than a journal behind a paywall. (And in many ways this is really good - the reward for sharing or going OA is greater circulation and more citations).
But I can't imagine that either closed journal companies or closed journal article authors are pleased with this. If enough of us see some value in it, I wonder if we can ask someone at the Foundation to negotiate with these services for some kind of preferential/free access? Perhaps a limited amount of free browsing with a registered Wikipedia login or something like that. It would certainly help the work of editing - both in terms of citing well as well as in terms of looking up that citation or checking up on it. The journals market is so centralised, there are literally two companies and two services to talk to for just about everything under the sun.
A related problem is what currently happens to material on Google books. You follow a citation link on a Wikipedia page, say to a particular page, and you find that the page in question is disbarred - as it has not been made available under the (usually minimal) free page views that the copyright holder of the book has authorised Google to allow. This is a shame because my understanding of the situation is that even when something like 10% of the book is allowed to be seen, the Google books process is somewhat random, and doesn't necessarily include the one page you want in your session. But - if this were technically possible and if someone at the Foundation was interested in talking to Google about this - if each Google books citation link from Wikipedia were to assuredly take us to that page (assuming some minimal viewing permission, so this wouldn't apply to books where the copyright holder has provided *no* permissions) then that would be really helpful for editors, both those making the citation as well as others checking up on it. (And probably turn a lot of the non-linking citations to pages in a book into links that take you somewhere).
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