Academics Waking Up to Wikipedia

Many people have a strangely ambivalent attitude to Wikipedia. On the one hand, they recognise that it's a tremendous resource; but on the other, they point out it's uneven and flawed in places. Academics in particular seem afflicted with this ambivalence.

So I think that this move by a group of academics to roll up their digital sleeves and get stuck into Wikipedia is important:

Some of our colleagues have determined to improve it with their own contributions. Here are some instances in which they have assumed significant responsibility for their fields:

# History of Science: Sage Ross and 80 other specialists in the field are contributing.
# Military History: Over 600 amateur and professional specialists in many sub-fields are contributing.
# Russian History: Marshall Poe and over 50 other specialists in the field are contributing.

Clearly, the more people that take part in such schemes, the better Wikipedia will get - and the more people will improve it further. (Via Open Access News.)

More than Academic?

I'm always a bit sceptical about academic studies of open source, since they tend to tell what you already knew, but five years late and dressed up in obfuscatory language. That said, there seems to be some genuine content in this specimen, entitled "Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla". Worth a quick gander, at least. (Via AC/OS.)

Digital Universe Powers Up the Earth Portal

The Digital Universe is a fascinating experiment in trying to get all the benefits of Wikipedia's distributed approach to content creation without the well-publicised hiccoughs that an open philosophy can entail.

This makes the news that the grandly-named Earth Portal, part of the Digital Universe, has acquired some high-powered UK academics for its forthcoming Encyclopedia of Earth of particular interest. Given that Encyclopedia of Earth is likely to be the first part of Digital Universe to go live, it will inevitably be regarded as a test-case for the whole project.

Why Open Access Makes Sense

There are lots of moral reasons why academics should support open access. But there is also an extremely strong pragmatic one: their work is more widely read, and their institutions gain in visibility and hence prestige.

Open access? - You'd be daft not to.

Update. Peter Suber has kindly sent me this link to a huge bibliography of studies that demonstrate the benefits of open access in even more detail.

Open Access - Get the Facts

A piece that writes very positively about open access's future quotes a survey from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) that examined academics' attitude to different forms of publishing. According to figures given in a story referred to by the first article, some 96.2% of those surveyed support peer review - the standard academic process whereby a paper is sent to referees for comments on its accuracy. So far, so good.

Except that the headline given on the second site is "Academic authors favour peer review over open access" - as if the two were in opposition. In fact, most open access titles employ peer review, so the 96.2% in favour of it were not expressing any opinion about open access, just about peer review.

However, the second article does quote two other figures: that "nearly half" of the academics surveyed thought that open access would undermine the current system (which requires academic institutions to take out often hugely-expensive subscriptions to journals), and that 41% thought that this was a good thing.

To find out whether this 41% refers to the entire sample, or only to those who thought open access would undermine the old system, I naturally went to the CIBER site in order to find out what the real figures were. It turns out that the 41% refers to the whole sample, not just those who viewed the rise of open access as likely. Among the latter group, more than half were in favour.

The Publishers Association and the International Association of STM Publishers, which sponsored the report, must be pretty gutted by the results that a significant proportion of academics rather like the idea of open access destroying the current system. But not peer review. As Microsoft likes to say, in a rather different context, and with a rather different effect, Get The Facts.