Slashdot Mirror
Arrangement With Science Publisher Raises Questions About Wikipedia's Commitment To Open Access
Applehu Akbar writes: Elsevier, the science publisher notorious for maintaining high-priced research journals in a time when web technology can accomplish the same tasks for a fraction of the price, has donated free ScienceDirect accounts to a select group of "top Wikipedia editors" as an incentive for citations referencing its paywalled journals. This arrangement is being criticized for its effect on Wikipedia's accessibility and openness. Ars reports: "...Michael Eisen, one of the founders of the open access movement, which seeks to make research publications freely available online, tweeted that he was 'shocked to see @wikipedia working hand-in-hand with Elsevier to populate encylopedia w/links people cannot access,' and dubbed it 'WikiGate.' Over the last few days, a row has broken out between Eisen and other academics over whether a free and open service such as Wikipedia should be partnering with a closed, non-free company such as Elsevier."
It's like Socrates once said:
TO READ THIS CITATION PLEASE JOIN THE ELSEVIER PREMIUM PLUS PROGRAM BY CLICKING HERE
And that's about all I have to say about that.
Elsevier, the science publisher notorious for maintaining high-priced research journals in a time when web technology can accomplish the same tasks for a fraction of the price, has donated free ScienceDirect accounts to a select group of "top Wikipedia editors" as an incentive for citations referencing its paywalled journals. This arrangement is being criticized for its effect on Wikipedia's accessibility and openness. Ars reports: "...Michael Eisen, one of the founders of the open access movement, which seeks to make research publications freely available online, tweeted that he was 'shocked to see @wikipedia working hand-in-hand with Elsevier to populate encylopedia w/links people cannot access,' and dubbed it 'WikiGate.' Over the last few days, a row has broken out between Eisen and other academics over whether a free and open service such as Wikipedia should be partnering with a closed, non-free company such as Elsevier."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
...on tacking "-gate" on the end of every little dust-up? Just say no!
I mean, what if some other Wikipedia scandal comes up, will we have to make WikiGate (disambiguation)?
Call it "Wikipedia paid journal scandal" instead!
Time to fork Wikipedia. All we really need is Google to start pointing somewhere else for its #1 topic on (keyword).
Elsevier is the target of a boycott that's been going on for over 3 years now :
http://thecostofknowledge.com/
(I've personally declined reviewing articles when I realized it was for an Elsevier journal).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Wikipedia will gain the ability to transfer closed knowledge into an open access model, citing back to the non-accessible source, spilling the closed-off knowledge into the open and strengthening us all.
That's a real thing. Hundreds of years ago, some idiot got it in his head that soaking in epsom salts was good for you, somehow; it eventually was said to "remove toxins", what toxins they may be never specified. Modern medical school repeats this, as many doctors have written their professional medical advice confirming the well-known effects of epsom salt baths on health in their ability to remove toxins from the body. Wikipedia can cite these texts to show that epsom salt baths have a biological cleansing effect, removing toxins from the body by drawing them out through the skin via osmotic pressure.
Too bad it's all bullshit.
A lot of studies carry information in contrary to what even professionals have put down in textbooks from their long heritage of professional knowledge. Much of that knowledge is bullshit, and much of that is known bullshit in the scientific field; too bad we can't access that information readily.
Rather than bringing that information into open access, people want to avoid soiling their hands by contact with a name or ideal they dislike. These are the same people who would let millions of peasants starve because it goes against some inborn moral position of theirs to feed them, for example because the available food is pork and pork is unclean.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Yeah, google, surely we can trust them with our data. They'd never mislead us.
A majority of scientific research is published in journals that are not open access. If Wikipedia is going to be a reliable source, it needs to rely on those publishers for scientific references just like the rest of world does. Now one of those publishers is giving free access to Wikipedia editors so that they can improve Wikipedia articles. This is bad???
Which isn't all of what you need, but it is a better start than nothing at all. I'd rather see a link to a journal I can't read than no link at all.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If you get in bed with the devil, sooner or later you are going to have to fu....
Did wikipedia just jump the shark?
As far as I can tell, access to IEEE journals isn't any better than that of Elsevier if your institution doesn't have the cash to pay for the particular journal you want to read. If you're a private citizen forget it, you're not going to fork over the $35 or whatever it is per article just to maintain an interest in the latest bleeding edge technologies. I'm doing a PhD at a leading UK engineering institution, and the view there is if you publish in something other than an IEEE journal you've failed. The stuff we publish by default becomes closed off to the majority of the literate public. Someone already posted the reasons Elsevier are singled out for criticism (http://thecostofknowledge.com/) but since most ACs won't read the details and limit the argument to equating paywall to evil, we really ought to start bashing IEEE publishing - which I would gamble many Slashdotters might actually want to read.
I knew I needed to stop reading Slashdot and finish my PhD when I started to miss articles by Bennett Haselton.
This partnership says more about Elsevier than it does about Wikipedia. With so many researchers abandoning them, they are willing to make deals with Wikipedia, an organization they would have laughed at just a few years ago, just to maintain some kind of relevancy. I think it shows how desperate they truly are.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Wikipedia has many, many problems, but this is not one of them. An encyclopedia project has to reflect the current state of knowledge, regardless of where it's published. You can't just leave out all the bits that aren't Open Access.
I run the Wikipedia Library program at the Wikimedia Foundation. We work with over 40 leading publishers including from multiple fields and languages, including Elsevier. We value this debate and the series of issues it raises.
The Twitter discussion we had last week with Mr. Eisen was quite lively and included several responses from our perspective, including support from some prominent Open Access advocates who understand the pragmatic necessity of gaining access to these resources.
This is a very important discussion for us--because Wikipedia itself is an Open Access, Open Knowledge project; yet, we are tasked with writing the best possible encyclopedia with the sources that exist today--so many (too many) of which are behind Paywalls.
Our work with publishers brings that content to the public in a usefully summarized form whereas it otherwise would be completely unreachable for many. It's not perfect, but it's better than the alternative.
We are also looking forward to a world in which knowledge is more truly free (including the sources and data underlying it), but meanwhile, we have an encyclopedia with 500 million monthly readers to write. In 2013 our medical pages alone were viewed 4.8 billion times--we cannot just wait for the publishing industry to transform, we also have readers who are coming to and relying on us today.
We're trying to advance on both fronts, by working collaboratively with publishers, helping them to realize the value of opening up their content to the world.
At the same time we are promoting open access as the future shape of knowledge in a world with fewer barriers for those who want to learn, research, and create.
We have published guides to finding and supporting OA publishers on our Library main page, we promote full-text discovery tools like the Open Access Button, and we are co-hosting the upcoming Open Access Week global OA editathon with SPARC this October. Wikipedia also has its own very progressive open access policy regarding our publications and the research that we enable or fund.
You can find all the information you need about our program and the eyes-open choice to work with publishers here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:WHYNOTOA1
Thank you for bringing attention to this issue. It's important that the public engage in it and have a nuanced understanding of how complex and critical the evolving state of knowledge is today.
--Jake Orlowitz, The Wikipedia Library (jorlowitz@wikimedia.org, @WikiLibrary)
Wikipedia is taken over by asperger's obese hikikkomori admins who delete things as "not notable" even when they have thousands of sources avalible. Wikipedia tricked me into donating years ago and I am still waiting for my money back. Wikipedia is the "systemD" of encyclopedias.
Just want to clarify that I wrote the above post before creating an account.
Calling this issue "WikiGate" reflects a rather single-minded focus.
A few days ago, we learned that there was an extortion ring operating in Wikipedia – see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... or http://www.independent.co.uk/n... and many others.
A few months ago, we learned that a hoax article had survived for ten years on Wikipedia, and that its content had come to be cited in numerous places, among many other hoaxes: https://www.washingtonpost.com... see also http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...
A few weeks prior to that, we learned that an administrator had managed to manipulate Wikipedia's articles on a bogus Indian business school over a period of years, with an Indian journalist estimating that Wikipedia had messed up thousands of students' lives by lending its brand's supposed credibility to the school's misleading propaganda: http://www.newsweek.com/2015/0... and http://scroll.in/article/71429...
Each of those would have deserved the title WikiGate more than this non-issue, which if anything actually helps improve Wikipedia's reliability.
WP policy pretty much since day one has been that a source does *not* get preference for being online and/or open access. You may have to go to a particular library's rare book collection to check a source, and that's okay.
As long as this is the policy, citing Elsevier sources is just fine, and making it easier for them to be checked is a net positive.
so, the phenomenally impartial -up to the point of consistently dropping input and norms from commonly agreed international bodies- Wikipedia,
has now selected Elsevier as a sanctioned source of information in relation to academic intellect.
Yuck!
This is seriously bad. Surely the arrangement can be undone, no?
Open access? Wikipedia's not "open". Just publish something one of the editors doesn't like, watch it be scrubbed within an hour, and ask yourself just how open Wikipedia is. Wikipedia isn't open---it justs masquerades as open. I'm not surprised.
"Free labor."
I see a couple of motivations for Elsevier in doing this. One is that it encourages people to pay to see entire journal articles when they're cited on Wikipedia. The other is about image and trying to look good by donating access to otherwise expensive journals. Effectively, these editors are being compensated for writing on Wikipedia, which is a form of paid editing. I don't think it's strictly prohibited, but Wikipedia must disclose this in order to remain credible. Furthermore, those editors shouldn't be editing any articles about Elsevier or their journals because it's a conflict of interest. Also, despite this partnership, citing only Elsevier journals to provide sources for a statement must be discouraged unless a more accessible source isn't available. It's very difficult for other editors to verify the information in those sources due to the cost. If Wikipedia upholds its own guidelines, I don't think this is really a problem. But the guidelines must be upheld.
M-I-Z
kU still sucks!
Wikipedia lives in the real world, and valuable content comes from all kinds of places, including companies we may or may not like. While it would be nice to think that leverage exists to get Elsevier to change its practices, that's at worst fanciful and at best a suggestion... hardly a scandal that. Or, as said best by James Hare of Wikimedia DC on Twitter earlier today: "Open access is not a suicide pact."
Elsevier, the science publisher notorious for maintaining high-priced research journals in a time when web technology can accomplish the same tasks for a fraction of the price,
Because providing access is all a publisher does, right?
No. Top science publishing requires accessibility, good layouts, solid content, and excellent writing. Scientist make mistakes in content so we have peer review. Even more commonly, scientists aren't always excellent writers and this is why you have line editors. Publishers of old have enabled accessibility, peer review, and quality writing. The fact that publishing now has become cheaper, does not mean the latter two are suddenly free as this slashdot article implies.
It's okay that publishing science costs money. Really. As a publishing scientist I do dislike Elsevier, however, but precisely because they're skimping out of good quality line editing and typesetting.
Yes, this is bad. Science should be open for all.
Fuck Elsevier, IEEE, and similar ones.....
aaaaaaa
Yes, it's bad when you can't access the references.
No, you can't read the references... just trust me.
"Citation needed"
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
MySpace was the 800# Gorilla, then came Facebook. Yahoo lost to Google. Microsoft is going down hard. Wikipedia needs some serious competition. If they believe that any closed content is acceptable, then someone needs to bury them.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
We are also looking forward to a world in which knowledge is more truly free (including the sources and data underlying it), but meanwhile, we have [money to make].
Fixed it for you.
I like the idea about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access/Signalling_OA-ness
Promoting open access content, is the only way to beat back the (horrible necessity) of dealing with paywalled content, when trying to make all this knowledge available.
--Jake Orlowitz, The Wikipedia Library (jorlowitz@wikimedia.org, @WikiLibrary)
So Jake, one question. Who was paid off? Who is it that is cashing in on million of hours of other people's effort? I suspect whoever it is will be quitting next year and getting a VP position at Elsevier.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Well, current partners of the Wikipedia Library project include Adam Matthew, BMJ, British Newspaper Archive, Cochrane, Credo, De Gruyter, DynaMed, Elsevier ScienceDirect, FindMyPast, HighBeam, HeinOnline, JSTOR, Keesings, Loeb, MIT Press Journals, Newspapers.com, OCLC, Oxford, Past Masters, Pelican Books, Public Catalogue Foundation, Project MUSE, RIPM, Royal Society, Royal Pharmaceutical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, Sage Stats, ScotlandsPeople, Questia and Women Writers Online. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
... ;) The fact is this came about quite differently. Volunteers had for years complained about lack of access to JSTOR et al.; Jake did something to remedy that. And he started out doing it as a volunteer himself. Credo, HighBeam and JSTOR were first; Elsevier came aboard later, as one of many. This was in no way Elsevier's initiative.
That's a lot of VP positions to fill
How is this different than citing a book? Or a printed article? These are usually "paywalled" in that you have to go through the walls of a physical library/bookshop. I don't see any difference between a reference to Physical Review 45, pg. 212 (1934), a legitimate citation, or that with a link to the DOI for the same article.
This sort of thing has been going on Wikipedia for some time. Some editors have dared to use books from a library for their sources! This would require other editors to purchase the book or to go to a library to check the reference! This kind of practice should be condemned. If the source can not be found with a Google search it should not be used!
The reason is, you just can't get a lot of high quality articles on complex subjects without paying people
sure, there are a lot of nerds with nothing better to do then spend dozens of hours formatting tables of semi useful info, but alot of the hard articles - I am an acknowledged expert in DNA electrophroresis - are just not gonna get done well unless people are paid
now the pay doesn't have to be cash; it can be prestige - wiki wants to make me an editor, with control of edits on an article on DNA electrophresis, that features my name, I'll consider donating my time
till then, no way
Can't speak to what 'benefits' or 'incentives' Elsevier gave the 'wiki editors' for their linking, mentioning, or citing, but to me it screams as a conflict of interest and unethical. Disappointed to see that Science, or at least the reporting and propogating of such for informative purposes, has sunken to these levels, but with more monetary scrutiny than ever being put on scientific research, it was probably wholly inescapable.
I think I've seen this - - - somewhere 1) 'give' access to FOSS editors 2) wait for links to $ub$cribe 3) $$$$
redneck geek
Unfortunately, that's exactly what a sock puppet would say before using this account to shill :x
If there is a reference, and it is paywalled, you can always try to just email the researcher directly and ask for a copy.
And, in addition, in mathematics, one can usually find a pre-print on arxiv.
If you had a nickel bag for every time someone said Wikipedia has "jumped the shark", you must have shopped at Aldi's, but the put out the boxes everything is shipped in, and those are free for the taking.
You can access the references for free. You just need to go to a library. You may have heard of such a building, it contains books. Books are an archiac form of the internet where the web pages appear on pieces of paper.
Ah, yes. We have a small library in town but they don't have any Elsevier subscriptions.
I would need to drive an hour or two to the nearest university library and somehow beg them for permission to access their collection.
Not a viable solution for me (or many other people).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Very nice strawman. However, Wikipedia does not claim that bathing in epsom salts removes toxins.
So tell me, if a paid top wiki editor (there are many) puts some epsom salt bs in an article with a citation to an unrelated paywalled article, how am I supposed to know to add the [not in citation] tag?
"Wikipedia should be partnering with a closed, non-free company such as Elsevier"
Never! Elsevier must die a sudden death and that real quick.
Ah, yes. We have a small library in town but they don't have any Elsevier subscriptions.
If you could convince them there was substantial public interest in the paper, they might pay for a one-time download. Good luck! heh heh heh
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
(1) Wikipedia needs to be putting up good articles which means using the _right_ references/links, not ones chosen by the wrong criteria, in this case by paid links. There will be some science where an Elsevier journal is the correct reference. There will be much where it is not. So this sort of thing can affect the integrity of the articles. That is the primary issue. Not the Elsevier link per se, but the fact that deals like this bias the content of the articles, and thus reduce their integrity. (2) OA as it is now sucks. I get a dozen emails a week from predatory OA publishers who want me to pay to write for them. The problem with OA is the feedback dynamic. If journal income is linked to NUMBER of articles accepted, this drives quality down (accept everything!). In a subscription model, journal income is linked to quality. And yes, this really is true. I work at a university and every year the academics are asked to review the journals we subscribe too, and you can bet that ones that cost money and are not much use get cut (well, unless a staff member is on the editorial board...). The _only_ OA journals that are any good in my experience (IUCrJ, say, or PRX or New Journal of Physics) are put out by established publishers who have a line of subscription journals and, importantly, who have a reputation to lose. OA is definitely preferable ethically --the wider the dissemination, the better the scientific dialogue. And if the science is publicaly funded it ought to be publicly available. And Elsevier definitely charge more than seems reasonable in the e-world. But OA as it is is broken. The best solution would be a consortium of universities that get together to run a mirrored server and do full peer review. Something like a CTAN or CRAN but of science/research. They could easily do it for the money they spend on journals and still make it all completely freely available -- they'd need an editorial staff for each discipline and sub-discipline, but they could be delocalised. It would be a bit like arXiv, but more comprehensive and less of a clique. Yeah, right. My 2 cents.
All wiki needs to do is request authors to share their work via their personal website and that will resolve this issue. See: http://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/sharing
The fact that it has half-way useable information is both an accident and the only way it can continue to function for its original purpose: as a link-farm.
I dislike Elsevier's extortionate rates for information access as much as the next researcher and try to pay them as little as I can get away with. However, Wikipedia has only ever been a starting point for investigation into any topic. At best it may give you a fair understanding of the subject and/or the issues at play, but generally it serves as an aggregator and should not be construed as anything more definitive. As such, allowing citations of closed sources such as those from Elsevier is pretty much the same as what Google already does and has always done. There's no real controversy here.
Disclaimer: I have contributed mods to Wikipedia in the past. I do not work for Elsevier or any other publisher.
licet differant, aequabitur
The Twitter discussion we had last week with Mr. Eisen was quite lively and included several responses from our perspective, including support from some prominent Open Access advocates who understand the pragmatic necessity of gaining access to these resources.
Of course, this ignores the inherent contradiction - you're going to publish a "fact", mark a closed pay-wall journal as your source, which now means that only people who can afford the pay-wall will ever know if that source actually backs up the fact you've put on the wiki.
Put another way - I can foresee a lively business in making lively-sounding "research journals" that hide behind paywalls in order to allow folks to put the view of their choice on the page. After all, I've put citations up for all these arguments; not my fault if you're not paying to see the source material!