The case for #Wikimedia Foundation as an #ORCID member organisation

The Wikimedia Foundation is a research organisation. No two ways about it; it has its own researchers that not only perform research on the Wikimedia projects and communities, they coordinate research on Wikimedia projects and communities and it produces its own publications. As such it qualifies to become an ORCID Member organisation.

The benefits are:

• Authenticating ORCID iDs of individuals using the ORCID API to ensure that researchers are correctly identified in your systems
• Displaying iDs to signal to researchers that your systems support the use of ORCID
• Connecting information about affiliations and contributions to ORCID records, creating trusted assertions and enabling researchers to easily provide validated information to systems and profiles they use
• Collecting information from ORCID records to fill in forms, save researchers time, and support research reporting
• Synchronizing between research information systems to improve reporting speed and accuracy and reduce data entry burden for researchers and administrators alike

At this time the quality of information about Wikimedia research is hardly satisfactory. As is the standard; announcements are made about a new paper and as can be expected the paper is not in Wikidata. The three authors are not in ORCID, as is usual for people who work in the field of computing so there is no easy way to learn about their publications.

What will this achieve; it will be the Wikimedia Foundation itself that will push information about its research to ORCID and consequently at Wikidata we can easily update the latest and greatest. It is also an important step for documentation about becoming discoverable. It is one thing to publish Open Content, when it is then hard to find, it is still not FAIR and the research does not have the hoped for impact. It also removes an issue that some researchers say they face; they cannot publish about themselves on Wikimedia projects. 

Another important plus; by indicating the importance of having scholarly papers known in ORCID we help reluctant scientists understand that yes, they have a career in open source, open systems but finding their work is very much needed to be truly open.

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Wikisource is not a data repository

The cost of access to proprietary data sources has only gone up. The budgets of libraries has not kept pace and relevant sources that used to be available to students for study and research are often no longer available. It is no longer an issue only for libraries in "other" countries.

Many universities and even countries like the Netherlands mandate that scientific publications need to be made available as Open Access. Typically publications and data become available under a free license for the whole world to use. One key side effect is that true science is helped exactly because the data and publications are freely available.

Recently, the library of Harvard University made millions of its library records available under a CC-0 license. These records contain bibliographic information about books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more and are in the "Marc21" format.

Data like this is useful when you can query it and it remains useful as long as it is maintained. This data is maintained by Harvard University and it is maintained because it is key to the functioning of its library. It is unlikely that Harvard University is the only library in need of such data and once many organisations work together maintaining a universal database about books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more, the data becomes more complete, authoritative and useful.

Having such data in Wikisource as has been suggested is not a good idea for several reasons. Wikisource is used for storing text, not data. A rich resource like this needs continuous and reliable maintenance to be useful. All this is available from Harvard. The catalog records are available for bulk download from Harvard, and are available for programmatic access by software applications via API's at the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). 

When data like this is useful to the Wikimedia Foundation's projects, the first order of business would be to study those API's maybe implement them and only consider storing such data at the Wikimedia Foundation for editing when there is a benefit. One benefit could be to integrate data from other sources and the subsequent need for de-duplication. Then again, it is unlikely that librarians are waiting for the Wikimedia movement to get into this act and, realistically the WMF will need an operational Wikidata before it can unleash its communities on what is just one of the many many important data resources that are available under a free license.

Thanks,

       GerardM

Open Access

Given that I am very much in the open source and open content world, it will not be a surprise that I am very much in favour of open access and that I do not think highly of the patent system.

I think that it is easy to argue that patents kill. My argument goes like this; the pharmaceutical industry is documented to be only interested in patentable medicine. When a medicine is not patentable, they do not have an incentive in researching its application for particular purposes. Recently the university of Alberta found by accident that dichloroacetate (DCA), appears to suppress the growth of cancer cells without affecting normal cells. The problem is that there is no funding for doing the research to prove the efficacy of this medicine. It is therefore easy to understand that only substances that are patentable are considered in much of the bio-medical research.

I think that is is easy to argue that the classic business model for scientific publishing kills. The cost of reading scientific articles is staggering. The article published in Nature about what is demoed on wikiprofessional.info, for me it is a really exciting article, for me this really relevant article costs $30,- to read. I can not lawfully send it to my mother to read. I can only tell her. Scientific journals assume that the only people who need to read their papers are scientists; the scientific libraries will have a subscription and that is how it has always been. Except that it is not true. Laymen have as much a need to read bio-medical science papers; they or their loved ones are affected by all kinds of afflictions. They have a need to understand what is happening to them. Often doctors do not know all the details that are available and , there are enough documented cases where research on the literature by laymen made a difference. One famous example is known as "Lorenzo's oil", a story about a disease called adrenoleukodystrophy or ALD.

Not only laymen are denied access to literature, many universities cannot afford the cost of literature. With the science results owned by business, it is important to understand how vital the whole "open" movement already is. A new, a different business model is needed and many organisations are developing these. The big challenge is for science to become science again; to be able to research without having the public pay again and again and some companies walking away with only an eye for profit.

The challenge will be to find a balance that does justice to all parties involved.

Thanks,
GerardM