Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Toll-free linking

 The Wikipedia Library Toll-free referral linking: Removing barriers between Wikipedia readers and your content



What Wikipedia can do for you
Wikipedia is a valuable resource for supporting the whole of the research process: from discovery of topics and research materials, to verifying knowledge about myriad topics, to helping researchers define or clarify information they are reading in their work. In a number of research contexts, readers have developed a research habit to check Wikipedia on a regular basis to clarify and inform themselves about new topics they encounter.

In the modern information age, search no longer begins at the library or the archive. It begins with a Google search and typically goes next to the top-linked Wikipedia article. There's a saying in the library world that discovery happens elsewhere (meaning not at the library itself). What is less often mentioned is that these days, elsewhere is Wikipedia. This is why some publishers have begun embedding Wikipedia content in their own discovery portals to keep readers on their platform. Toll-free linking is a complementary approach: it brings readers who started with Wikipedia into your platform.

"Wikipedia is already the 8th largest referrer of CrossRef DOIs. Note that this doesn't just mean that the Wikipedia cites lots of CrossRef DOIs, it means that people actually click on and follow those DOIs to the scholarly literature."

Partners that have donated access to their resources to prolific Wikipedia editors have seen incoming traffic rises of 200% as readers click citations on live Wikipedia articles. However, many readers stop there because they themselves do not have access to the partner resource. The next step is for publishers to let these interested readers into the platform, to expose them to the content itself, instead of encountering a paywall which obscures the benefits of the linked source.

Benefits of toll-free linking include:
 * Increased site traffic from researchers discovering research on Wikipedia
 * Increased number of external links to your site, as Wikipedia references
 * Public good benefits, as high demand research gets shared with the public
 * Meeting organizational goals to spread high-quality information to the public
 * Visibility within the Wikimedia and research communities

What you can do for Wikipedia
Wikipedia serves as a gateway for readers to access the "sum of all human knowledge". The Wikipedia Library focuses on supporting the use of Wikipedia as a starting point, not a stopping point, by ensuring that readers can follow its references back to the original information source – after all Wikipedia is not the authoritative source, but rather the summary of authoritative information.

Because of Wikipedia's visibility, we have tens of thousands of readers every day who start their academic and expert research on Wikipedia, click on a link in one of our reference sections, and become frustrated by hitting a paywall. This kind of reader experience is good for neither Wikipedia nor for publishers: every time a user hits a paywall, or has trouble getting around things, it prevents them from engaging with research services, even if they have access to the resource because their local library subscribes.

When publishers create toll-free linking for readers being referred through Wikipedia, they avoid the barriers in discovery and bad user experience created by paywalls for the sources identified. Once the public research community has been introduced to the experience of your research platform, they are more likely to seek that platform for use again. In the age of belt-tightening at research libraries, the resources that libraries pay for are the ones which both a) show continued use, and b) provide at least limited public services.

Strategies for toll-free linking from Wikipedia
Every publishing platform, and the legal and business model which supports it, have differing realities.

Site policy that allows all traffic on Wikipedia to view full text of its destination article

The Wikimedia community is an "Open Knowledge" community, and strongly prefers linking to resources that readers can access with little resistance: very few of our top-referred domains are domains that primarily provide paywalled sources. A recent study published in arXiv, shows that open access scholarly journals sources are much more likely to be cited in a number of different disciplines.

Site policy which changes the most referred-to articles from Wikipedia into free-to-read versions

You may not want to open up all articles which receive traffic from Wikipedia, because it may represent an unusually large part of your collection; you could instead opt for a more limited and selective approach to creating more reader-friendly versions of articles by making the highest traffic-from-Wikipedia articles open access.

Click-through from Wikipedia to research articles is a sign of potential vitality: even though we have thousands of citations to scholarly sources in English Wikipedia, only some of these sources are consistently of public interest, and receive click-throughs.

Transforming frequently wanted articles into Open Access works increases the likelihood of both more citations on Wikipedia and more impact in other social media platforms. Open Access works have higher citation frequency, and as the rising importance of Altmetrics has shown, social sharing is closely tied to accessibility.

Research tools which allows users to "clip" or "share" excerpts of articles for use in Wikipedia citations

Two of the more successful partnerships in the Wikipedia Library database access program have been WP:Newspapers.com and WP:Newspaperarchive.com. Each includes a "clippings" feature, which allows users to create fair use sections of individual pages, which can then be shared using an open-access URL. These features have the benefit of allowing both social media sharing, and citations in blogs and other websites like Wikipedia, that allow relevant readers to access, but still retains the full work behind the paywall. For these services, business comes from access to the search tools once a source is discovered.

Our editor community is very familiar with, and strongly favors use of partial preview sources. For example, as of May 2015 Google Books previews are one of the most frequently used URLs in Wikipedia's citations: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/P587.

Allowing Wikipedia editors who use your database to select a page or paragraph to cite on Wikipedia would help meet a number of needs: it allows Wikipedia editors to verify the information found in a citation, it allows Wikipedia readers to click through to your platform and get a preview on how your database works, and it encourages more citations to your work.


 * For more discussion of this impact, see this blog post from a volunteer using Newspapers.com