Scholarly information is often too expensive to access. Academic publishers sell journal subscriptions for thousands of dollars per journal per year. Typically, only universities and large libraries, not individuals, are able to pay those fees, which limits access to researchers and others affiliated with institutions with money.

Are these costs justifiable when the underlying research is publicly funded and the underlying goal is public knowledge? If you’re a taxpayer you’ve already paid to fund the research, so why should you pay essentially another tax to read the findings of that research?

On May 20, a team of longtime advocates for public access to scholarly information launched a campaign to urge U.S. President Barack Obama to “require free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.” Opening up publicly-funded research will “provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research.”

This is consistent with Wikimedia’s non-profit mission “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.”

Wikimedia project volunteers, who are among the taxpayers, should not be denied free access to this information. They should be empowered to read it, report on it, and cite it. Wikipedia and its sister projects depend on the energy and unselfish dedication of this team of contributors – volunteers, researchers, and amateurs – who read and investigate sources as they work to compile accurate, up-to-date, verifiable knowledge. Each month, hundreds of millions of global readers view, and have the opportunity to evaluate and contribute to Wikimedia content. Many do not have the means (nor should they be required) to pay for knowledge, including useful economic, health and scientific information when their taxes fund the research.

We believe in open access and free licensing as fundamental forces to disseminate knowledge, support education and accelerate discovery.

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation is endorsing this petition, joining thousands of individuals and organizations expressing support for free access to taxpayer-funded research articles. We hope you will join us, too—anyone over age 13 can sign (and you do not need to be a US citizen).

Please consider signing this petition to mandate that all research funded by U.S. taxpayers be made freely available to the citizens of the Web.

Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst, Wikimedia Foundation
Geoff Brigham, General Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation
Kat Walsh, Member of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees

The open science movement is fighting to make scientific research – especially publicly funded research – more transparent, freely accessible and reusable. The goals of open science are closely aligned with our mission, yet for years there has been little institutional contact between our movement and initiatives such as Open Access and Open Data. Joining forces with individuals and organizations who are working to promote a culture of openness in the scientific community should be high on our agenda.

How can we achieve this goal? The Wikimedia Foundation is currently working on a set of policies to enforce the release of its research data and research output in the open and to incentivize researchers who seek our support or collaboration to do the same. More importantly, today we are thrilled to announce that our community is in a stronger position to bridge the gap with the open science movement. Daniel Mietchen – a biophysicist based in Germany, outspoken open data and open access advocate, and active member of the Wikimedia Research Committee – is the recipient of a grant from the Open Society Foundations and will become the first Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science with a focus on Open Access (OA).

The WiR program has been an immense success in the context of other initiatives such as GLAM. But what exactly is the mission of a Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science? In Daniel’s words, “a Wikimedian in Residence is someone trusted by and in good contact with both the Wikimedia and the partner communities who can guide article development on the target topics and help to keep in focus the common goals, in our case: improving Open Access coverage and reuse
in WMF projects”.

As Daniel reports in his programmatic blog post, content from Open Access publishers is already widely used on Wikimedia projects, yet traditional publishers still receive way more citations from Wikipedia articles than their open counterparts. There are lots of one-time image and media donations to Wikimedia but ongoing donations from reusably licensed OA sources have not received adequate attention yet. Likewise, contents from suitably licensed text sources are systematically being used in WMF projects, but OA sources much less so.

Daniel’s mission is to facilitate the reuse of materials from Open Access articles in WMF projects, to improve coverage of topics related to Open Access in the English Wikipedia, to support the implementation of the WMF’s Open Access policy and to explore the potential for the WMF community to collaborate with Open Access, Open Science and Open Knowledge initiatives in general. In the long run, the project is designed to extend beyond Open Access and into Open Science proper, as well as into other languages and possibly other collaborative projects. The directions this project ultimately aims to explore, and how to go about the exploration, will be determined in part on the basis of community feedback received during the pilot phase. The host of the project is the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which will also act as a content partner and as a contact point for external expertise on matters of Open Knowledge, especially Open Data.

How can you help support this initiative?

• submit requests for illustrations of articles on scientific topics, to help identify suitable images from OA sources
• share your views on the Open Access and Open Data policy draft
• help us understand how to coordinate OA activities across languages and projects
• check out OA journals as a potential source for articles and media and for Picture of the day/month/year
• help connect this project with other GLAM and outreach projects

You can follow the development of the OA movement via the OA Tracking Project and Daniel’s work via his dedicated blog, the WiR-OS page on Meta and Twitter: @EvoMRI

Daniel Mietchen, Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science
Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst