User:Elysia (AR)/draft

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit academic publisher, releasing annual volumes of review articles in fifty-one different subjects. Its articles are widely used on Wikipedia: Nearly 8,000 Wikipedia articles contain an Annual Reviews Digital Object Identifier (DOI), used to identify unique publications, including 123 Featured Articles and 251 Good Articles.

This is an article about the Annual Reviews becoming more accessible to Wikipedia editors and readers.

Prior to 2016, Wikipedia editors who wished to use Annual Reviews publications as a source had to use unreliable tactics like emailing authors or looking for a free version on ResearchGate. In 2016, Annual Reviews donated 100 accounts to the Wikipedia Library (TWL) so that some volunteers could access their biomedical review articles for editing. In 2019, the donated accounts' access was broadened to all journals and their back volumes, or 40,000 articles in total, not just journals relevant to biomedical sciences.

When the Library Bundle was introduced by TWL in 2020, editors no longer had to apply individually for one of the 100 accounts. Instead, any editor can instantly access twenty-nine article collections, including Annual Reviews, if they meet basic criteria:
 * Having an account at least six months old
 * 500+ edits
 * 10+ edits in the last month
 * No active blocks

To see if you're eligible for the Library Bundle, visit the Library Card platform.

In addition to providing access to editors, we are rolling out an initiative that helps Wikipedia's readers. Readers looking to fact-check or learn more about an article’s contents may attempt to click through to the references. As of 2018, however, less than half of sources cited on Wikipedia had a freely readable version online somewhere. The 2020 volumes of five Annual Reviews journals were published Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license: Cancer Biology, Environment and Resources, Nuclear and Particle Science, Political Science, and Public Health. In 2021, an additional three journals will be published open access for the first time, with eight journals total published open access.

Changing a journal from gated access to open access sets the intention that all future volumes will be published open access. While older volumes of that journal are not relicensed to CC BY 4.0, Annual Reviews removes the paywalls for all back volumes.

Licensing restrictions mean that Wikipedians often have few images, if any, to illustrate articles (which may be of comically bad quality). Publishing open access has an added benefit in that most images from the newer volumes of these journals can be repurposed for Wikipedia (exceptions are noted in image captions).

For more information about the Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) publishing model, which allows publishers to convert to open access without article processing charges to authors, see the Subscribe-to-Open Community of Practice. In 2020, nineteen journals from various publishers were published open access under S2O; in 2021, 74 S2O journals are anticipated.