Nice op-ed. I like to mention newspaper articles as another issue. They used to be freely accessible, but now more and more newspapers are paywalling them, - at least in Denmark. Newspaper articles are rarely paid by tax-payers, so shouldn't we expect them to be paywalled when ads cannot pay for them completely? We should not refrain from using paywalled newspaper articles in Wikipedia. — fnielsen (talk) 20:17, 19 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In the United States no good newspaper is not paywalled. User:Fred BauderTalk 02:28, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I definitely agree. But I should add that in addition to getting public and charitable funders to demand public access to the data they pay for - which is truly a no-brainer - we should also look forward to the day when the tyranny of copyright is finally ended. It may seem hard to believe now, but there will be a time when the reference you add to an Elsevier journal is just as open as the reference you make to PLOS, because we will have learned to reject censorship as a method of economic policy, and all those papers will have been freely copied out for the public to read. Whether that has to happen through rational legal change, mass civil disobedience on Pirate Bay, or throwing the copyright enforcers off a tower in ISIS fashion, we should in any case welcome the day when at last it is no crime to read and share information. We can fund creative endeavors through a marketplace of voluntary contributions without rationing access to their results, provided we set minimum amounts at which each citizen of a given income must pay overall; for that matter, we can completely change an economic system that is meant to compel labor at all costs when in reality the labor is being taken over by machines and economic success is the birthright only of those who own the productive powers of the Earth. And when that day comes ... the edits these editors have made will still make up some of the collective public resources that will have been built from Wikipedia. Meanwhile, open access advocates need to address the clear need to create a wall of separation between archivist sites that maintain guaranteed public access to material, regardless of quality, and publishers who should call attention to the best papers without being paid anything for the privilege. The alternative is not pretty. Wnt (talk) 21:30, 19 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Good piece. Fortunately, we are starting to get access to necessary databases. There is no reason for people to be out of pocket for their good work in advancing the project, and it's starting to sink in, down in WMF land, that good access makes good articles. (sorry Robert)--Wehwalt (talk) 00:14, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Fred Bauder: "In the United States no good newspaper is not paywalled"—try the US edition of the Guardian. Tony(talk) 06:33, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Good point. NPR is mostly available, as is much of C-Span. I subscribe to three paywalls NYT, the New Yorker and WP, but miss the WSJ and FT. Couldn't, shouldn't, read that many papers. User:Fred BauderTalk 08:53, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for writing this. I think you make a great point about how open access advocates aren't demanding that university libraries stop subscribing to important journals. Josh Milburn (talk) 08:17, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There's a difference between choosing to stop submitting to particular journals and demanding that your library stop subscribing to them! Josh Milburn (talk) 13:21, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Good piece. As one of the "lucky" editors with a Elsevier Wikipedia Library sub I have to say that I have not yet (after some months) managed to access any article I wanted to read (mostly recent medical stuff). All the crown jewels seem to be excluded from the offer - afaik there's no list of what it covers. Johnbod (talk) 16:21, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well, not really. I haven't tried that often, but when I do try I don't get access, so that rather puts me off. Johnbod (talk) 18:47, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Johnbod, you should have full access to the entire corpus/database of ScienceDirect. It's their massive, premier sciences/medicine collection. Can you give me an example of a source that wasn't accessible through it? Cheers, Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 11:26, 21 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well I don't. I've forwarded you by email a message from them when I queried on one item via Nikkimaria, and I can't for example access this or this article, though I can get Lancet editorials etc, which I think anyone can. I also can't get textbook chapters like this. However I can get this when logged on, but not when not logged on. Johnbod (talk) 16:44, 21 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Good op-ed. This controversy is anything but. The best quality sources can sometimes be paywalled--peer reviewed articles among other things usually are. Limiting ourselves to non-paywalled could lead to a drastic reduction of quality for certain articles. Tutelary (talk) 21:36, 20 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I love to find sources that are open-access. I cite them all I can. But I don't see why I shouldn't additionally use my library subscription to JSTOR and my TWL subscription to Cairn -- even Elsevier if I happened to have it. I'm getting information out of those paywall sources and giving it to readers of the greatest open access encyclopedia there has ever been. When I cite my open access sources, all readers can use them; when I cite my paywall sources, a few readers will use them and all the rest will click out of them fast (to borrow Johnbod's phrase above, they'll be "put off"). Am I doing any harm to the open access movement? I don't think so. Andrew Dalby 17:30, 22 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If you don't acknowledge the difference between a public convention center offering beer and Mothers Against Drunk Driving having an open bar, or why the latter is far, far more troubling than the former, then you're either profoundly stupid or being extremely disingenuous in blind, fawning support of "your side". Jframda (talk) 08:01, 23 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
A couple years ago I started to write articles on academic books. At first, I was limited to writing about the ones for which I could find abundant online reviews (the old "if it's not on Google, it doesn't exist"). Now, I've learned the dusty reference tomes and retrospective databases and I know better. Without this esoteric access, I plainly wouldn't have the sources to write about books from the 60s and 70s, which are caught in a catch-22: their reviews locked away in journals perhaps popular at the time but not economical to index then and not economical to digitize now. These are the types of redlinks that will be very hard to fill unless we increase library access for editors. Godspeed you, TWL. – czar 03:56, 25 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The moral questions are not moot:
If we cite a "donated" resource, whether it's an account to a pay-walled publisher or a physical book, we may be failing in our duty of neutrality.
If we do not cite the best source, pay-walled or not, we do our readers a disservice.
If we cite pay-walled sources we risk helping perpetuate the pay-walls.
Wikipedia is not a platform for promoting anything, even the movement it is part of.
There is an alternative for material that exists in hardcopy: Cite the source in its dead-tree (paper) or dead-dinosaur (microfilm) form, as if you were at a public or university library and were looking at the paper- or microfilm version of the book/journal/newspaper/whatever. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 15:55, 10 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
When quoting limited-access material, editors should try to include a long enough quote so that it is clear that the source supports the claim, and they should try to include a long enough quote so that, if the work is ever indexed in a public search engine (as many paywalled books and scholarly articles already are) someone can search on the quote and verify the citation is correct. I say "try to" because if you can't do so without violating copyright or other law or Wikipedia's policies, guidelines, and practices (including the common practice of NOT making the "references" section look unnecessarily cluttered), don't do it. The same is true for material that is likely to suffer link-rot in the future. It's less critical for material where the reference contains a link that will likely be stable for years or decades or where it refers to a hardcopy publication that is widely available for free inspection (e.g. in public libraries or by browsing brick-an-mortar bookstores) now and likely to be widely available for free inspection for years to come. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 15:55, 10 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
