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Robin's Peek's Writing on Open Access
This is a preprint of a column in the “Focus on Publishing” series that will appear in the May 2008 issue of Information Today (www.infotoday.com). The preprint will be removed on April 30th and the postprint will be posted 3 months after publication.
Wikipedia and Misunderstandings
By Robin Peek
Of all the Web sites in all the days of Webdom no single site has ever touched a collective nerve the same way that Wikipedia has. This month’s column is about two Wikipedia stories that illustrate the dynamics of how the mere association of the site in a particular context can set off a curious chain of events. One story involves Amazon’s Kindle and the other a group of physicists and the American Psychical l Society (APS).
The first story begins with how I can blame Wikipedia for inspiring me to acquire a Kindle. More specifically, I have to blame Amazon for invoking Wikipedia in their advertising. The Kindle is a device that many have heard of but few have seen, as the devices are significantly back-ordered at Amazon since it was launched in November. Folks who have read this column over the years know that I, like others, have been less than overwhelmed with the state of e-book scene. Poorly conceived devices that cost too much, consumed too much power too quickly, and books whose publishers offered the ever so slight discounts off the retail price that the whole thing was too much bother for too little gain. Yes there are free e-books in the public domain but I have a fondness for books reviewed in the New York Times.
I must admit though that in the back of my mind, why would Jeff Bezos put his company’s reputation on the line for a product with such a problematic lineage. They did not have to have a Kindle in their arsenal; in fact, this is a company that does actually have their own products. I thought perhaps Bezos had drunk the same Kool-Aid that made Bill Gates predict that long before now we would all have Tablet PC’s and they would cost less than one thousand dollars.
Admittedly at four hundred dollars the Kindle is not something most people would purchase without pondering, unless of course you are Bill Gates. But people do spend that amount for an iTouch or an iPhone by Apple and revel in its shiny, shiny coolness. However, February rolls around and I am prepping one of my lectures on trends in digital publishing and I popped over to the Amazon site to see what they what were saying about the Kindle now. Imagine then my surprise when our zippy commentator announces…”and you have free access to use Wikipedia whenever you want from your Kindle!”
I found this to be a curious endorsement. Was Wikipedia, that the living, breathing, content organism, being given some official blessing from Amazon who among other things is a bookseller? In all the world of Webdom was this the only site that the Kindle would have free access too? How would this work? How could you wall off Wikipedia from the rest of the Web?
As it turns out if you dig, and you do have to dig to find the truth, the Kindle is actually being prepared to do more than be a mere e-book reader, Highlighting Wikipedia is akin to saying that the Kindle works best with textual driven sites. And yes, for now at least these sites are freely searchable with Kindle Dealing with the Amazon Kindle is going a bit like navigating Google Labs (and these days you have to dig through three screens to get there.) Amazon calls these features “experimental” and Google calls them “not ready for prime time.” They share one quality though, you may see feature today, you may not see it tomorrow, and we are not really telling you where we are going with it. In fact, I decided the only way to really know what the Kindle would do was to order it (and then send it back). But to my surprise, I didn’t send it back. More on that another day.
Confusing OA and Wikipedia
A curious controversy that has been raised about Open Access (OA) content and Wikipedia. The story first appeared in the March 18th edition of New Scientist and was quickly passed around the Web. Now what makes story interesting is that it involves the APS and a group of physicists who find its copyright policy too restrictive, As reported in the New Scientist the physicists were seeking to be able to reproduce derivatives of their work in Wikipedia. While this assertion is true it actually only one item on a list of desires that these researchers seek with a less restrictive license, which involves wikis other than Wikipedia.
First, the APS is already a fully Green journal; in fact, it is the first Green publisher. So as far as OA is concerned then the APS has not only met (but it helped set) the standard for scientific and scholarly publishing. Still, editor-in-chief of the APS journals, Gene Sprouse, says that the society will review its copyright policy in May.
It remains, however, that Wikipedia is not a scholarly research vehicle nor does it want it to be nor does it have to be. In fact it has a policy that, “Wikipedia does not publish original research or original thought.” This is wise, Wikipedia cannot be all things to all people.
As Stevan Harnad long term OA advocate notes, “ Wikipedia insists on all rights for its content, including commercial re-use. Commercial re-use is most definitely not part of OA and should not be. It is directly antithetical to OA. He adds, “A Green publisher lets an author post and re-use his own writings anywhere and in any way he likes -- except to re-sell it, or authorize a rival publisher to re-sell it. To ask a publisher to give this up too is to ask him to commit suicide, and for absolutely no reason.”
So while this does not preclude a research from significantly rewriting his or her piece so that it would be consumable by a non-professional, a valid question could be raised if Wikipedia is the best place to do so, particularly if there is not a critical mass of qualified eyeballs to oversee any changes.
Robin Peek is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. For over a decade she has written the “Focus on Publishing” column for Information Today.
