Last week the WMF announced the release of its long-awaited open-access policy. In a statement on the Foundation's blog, executive director Lila Tretikov wrote that "Wikimedia is committed to nurturing open knowledge for all, unrestrained by cost barriers ... the Wikimedia movement has a longstanding commitment to open access practices. Today, we are excited to formalize that commitment with this policy."

Open access is a movement among researchers that was initially aimed at making research findings accessible to their colleagues, and now increasingly to the public. It evolved through the 1990s and early 2000s as scholars and scientists discovered the Web as a platform for communicating their findings. It became more formalized when the Budapest Open Access Initiative coined and defined the term. The Initiative sparked several follow-ups, among them the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which was signed by several Wikimedia entities, including the Foundation.

Daniel Mietchen, an active researcher in data science and member of WikiProject Open Access, told the Signpost that while many researchers welcome open access in principle, the incentive structures in universities and other research institutions do not always make this an easy choice for their own publications. In response, research institutions, funding bodies, governments and other organizations have begun to modify the incentive landscape through open-access mandates. These mandates require that research findings from specific institutions or funded through specific programs be made available open access.

The Wikimedia movement as a whole has a long history of engagement with open access; in particular, the Foundation has been supporting interactions with the research community, be it through the Research Committee (which oversees the monthly Research Newsletter published as part of the Signpost), through support of the WikiSym/ OpenSym annual conference series, or through other forms of significant support. Initial work on an open-access policy was started in 2010, consolidated and presented at Wikimania in 2011, but never formalized into an actual policy; at the same time, open-access policies have continued to expand in reach and scope.

The Foundation has meanwhile continued to take increasingly strong stances on the issue. In 2011, the research committee put together a response to an EU public consultation on the nature of scientific information in the digital age. In 2012, it responded to a similar consultation by the White House. A few months later, the WMF moved to endorse a petition made to the White House by the public-access group Access2Research, asking for “free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research” (Signpost coverage). In 2013, the White House responded with a directive that moves in this direction by requiring the largest public research funders in the US to develop taxpayer access policies similar to the NIH Public Access Policy that has been in effect since 2008. This policy development is still ongoing.

Open-access policies are particularly important in the context of the Wikimedia movement. Not only do members of the Wikimedia movement work to provide "open access to knowledge" for all of our readers—a goal complementary to that of the scholarly open-access movement—they directly benefit from the increasing transparency of journal publications for studying, sourcing and illustrating knowledge available through Wikimedia projects.

Mietchen says that in this context, "the WMF’s open-access policy shows interesting deviations from standard features of its academic siblings:

• It covers not just publications, but associated data, software and multimedia;
• It stresses the importance of open licensing, which facilitates and broadens the scope of reuse;
• It is itself available under an open license, so it can easily be adapted (e.g. translated);
• It avoids embargo periods (which most other policies allow for), and instead allows for limited exceptions;
• The exceptions are to be documented in public, which helps to collect data on the necessity for exceptions and can inform later refinements of the policy."

By establishing its own open-access policy, the Foundation has put its cards on the table and strengthened the alignment of its own research initiatives with the open-access movement. Further details on what the new policy means for researchers interested in the Wikimedia projects are in the open-access policy FAQ.

Since that Wikimania session in 2011, there have been multiple meetings in the movement on open access (while one specifically on the new policy has been proposed for Wikimania 2015) as well as dozens of talks (e.g. here or here) and blog posts (e.g. here or here) on the interaction between Wikimedia and open access (further Signpost coverage is linked in the sidebar).

Providing access to research is not always straightforward, highlighted by the long history of the proposal for an open-access policy for research coordinated with the support of an organization as committed to open access as the WMF. This is illustrated by the annual discussions about the open-access status of the research presented at WikiSym, a conference that spurred important contributions to Wikipedia research (2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012).

The new WMF policy on access to WMF-supported research—with its emphasis on open licensing and the option of publicly justified exceptions—could act as a catalyst for bringing the research and Wikimedia communities closer together. It is likely to lead to greater accessibility to research findings for contributors and other users of Wikimedia platforms. R, T

The Wikimedia Foundation this week announced the on-boarding of Guy Kawasaki to the Board of Trustees. Kawasaki replaces Bishakha Datta, who served from March 2010 to December 2014, in one of the four board seats reserved for "necessary expertise". In his introduction in the Foundation blog Kawasaki stated that "There are few projects in the history of the world that can have the long-term impact of Wikimedia ... the democratization of knowledge that Wikimedia stands for has been a long time in the coming, and I relish applying my passion and experience to this amazing mission." Executive director Lila Tretikov states that "Guy grasps what really moves people. His passion for extraordinary experiences is a perfect fit for Wikipedia’s remarkable mission."

The Board of Trustees is the WMF's "ultimate corporate authority"; as a new trustee, Kawasaki is now one of the ten people tasked with stewardship of the Wikimedia Foundation (and, through it, of the overall movement). Before his appointment to the Board, Kawasaki was chief evangelist for Canva, an online graphic design tool; he has formerly served as an adviser to Motorola and as a chief evangelist at Apple, where he "developed and popularized the concept of 'secular evangelism' for Apple’s brand, culture, and products". He has written ten books on the topics of business technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship, the first of which, The Macintosh Way, was published in 1989, and the most recent, The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users, late last year. Although the blog post provides little detail about why the Board chose Kawasaki, specifically, it is not hard to see what expertise Kawasaki, an extremely active social-media influencer (see, for instance, his LinkedIn roll or his Twitter), is meant to bring to the board: a recent Forbes story went so far as to call The Art of the Start 2.0, a refresh of a 2004 Kawasaki publication, "The New Entrepreneur's Bible". R

• Wikimedia Hackathon 2015: Registration is now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2015. The event, organized by Wikimedia France, is to take place in Lyon on May 23–25; the four current topical focuses are mobile applications, Wikidata, MediaWiki, and Wikimedia Labs development. As of writing, the event had 50 attendees, among them members of the Foundation's and various affiliates' technical personnel. Topics to be covered are under discussion at the phabricator, and to "help newcomers mingle", the hackathon is experimenting with buddy pairing. This event is likely to be one of the largest such hackathons organized independently of Wikimania 2015 this year. R
• Wikimedia for children?: French Wikimedian User:Astirmays has organized an excerpt of last month's strategic planning community consultation, re-igniting a discussion as to the possibility and practicability of a Wikimedia project "for kids". Such a wiki has been proposed on and off for some time: the record of the most recent efforts, including the 2013 nomination and subsequent withdrawal of independently organized Vikidia, is preserved at Wikikids on the meta-wiki, indicating a proposal history stretching back all the way to 2003 (Signpost coverage of the strategic planning consultation). R
• Wikimedia Netherlands chapter report: Wikimedia Nederland last week released their chapter report for January–February 2015. Highlights include January's awarding of the Erasmus Prize (see Signpost coverage), an education program translation project pilot, a gendergap editathon with Dutch feminist magazine Opzij, and the uploading of more than 2,500 high-resolution photos to Commons from the Museum Catharijneconvent. R

Prelude No. 1 in C major

A selection from The Well-Tempered Clavier played by Kimiko Ishizaka

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Problems playing this file? See media help.

• Entire book one of The Well-Tempered Clavier on Wikimedia Commons: The Open Well-Tempered Clavier is a Kickstarter-funded project to release a copyright-free recording, score, and braille edition of the first of two books of Johann Sebastian Bach's eponymous harpsichord works (here played on piano). The recordings, by Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka, were posted online this month. The FLAC files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Amire80 and are available in Category:Open Well-Tempered Clavier. Their previous project was Open Goldberg Variations, a similar release of Bach's work in 2012, also available on Commons at Category:Open Goldberg Variations. G
• Wikimedian in Residence in Scotland: Sara Thomas became Wikimedian in Residence at the Museums Galleries Scotland this week, making her the second such resident in Scotland—the first, Ally Crockford, is currently in residence at the National Library of Scotland. The UK has a long history in the GLAM program: the very first Wikimedian in residence, Liam Wyatt, completed a residency at the British Museum back in 2010 (Signpost coverage). For more on the GLAM initiative, see the GLAM newsletter. R
• Wiki Education Foundation monthly report: The Wiki Education Foundation have released their monthly report. The highlights, directly from their blog, are: a partnership signed with the National Women’s Studies Association, Association for Psychological Science, and the Communication across the Curriculum initiative at Louisiana State University; foundational planning work on new digital coursework infrastructure, funded with a $300K grant from the Stanton Foundation; and the launching of Wiki Ed's first student pilot program at University of California Berkeley, the University of Arizona, and Oregon State University. R
• SUL notifications trigger project milestones: A number of projects passed milestones on March 18 this week, mostly as a function of the mass-messaging of users affected by the upcoming SUL finalization process (coverage in last week's report). The Finnish Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 total pages, the Finnish Wikibooks has reached 10,000 total pages, the Spanish Wikiversity has reached 10,000 total pages and 100,000 page edits, and—perhaps most impressively—the Moldovan Wikipedia has reached 10,000 page edits, despite having been closed to regular editing since 2006. The Armenian Wikipedia reached 150,000 articles this week in a metric uninflated by SUL, and the French Wikivoyage hit 5,000. R

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-25/Serendipity

2015-03-25

How my father's railroad image collection now benefits the world: the value of digitization

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By Michael Barera

Once when I was young, growing up in the 1990s, my father pulled his collection of railroad slides out from the basement, set up his projector, and shared a glimpse into American railway history with our family. I was too young to remember the slides distinctly, but I do remember being really impressed by the experience. Many years later, a sequence of seemingly unrelated events would lead me back to these slides and a vision for digitizing them. In 2013, while I was the Wikipedian in Residence at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, I met Edward Vielmetti for a conference panel on the relationship between wikis and libraries. Before the panel, he introduced me to ArborWiki, a LocalWiki for all things related to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then, while I was attending an ArborWiki meetup in 2014, I met David Erdody, who runs an analog-to-digital media conversion service called A2Digital. After learning that he had the equipment and expertise necessary to digitize slides, I immediately thought back to my father's collection and the possibility of digitizing it.

The slides themselves were taken both by my father (David) and his father (my grandfather, Lawrence). Most were created in the Midwestern United States, especially Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, chiefly during the 1960s and 1970s (although one photograph of an Ann Arbor Railroad Steam Special dates back to circa 1950). Their featured subjects are largely passenger trains, and due to their dates of creation they document both the last decade of private passenger rail service in the United States and the early years of Amtrak. According to my father, the majority of the photographs were taken by my grandfather, who was an avid amateur photographer; however, both my father and my grandfather would often go railfanning together, making it impossible to discern who took each individual photograph in most cases. For this reason, all of the digitized photographs credit "Lawrence and David Barera" as the photographer. However, because my father is my grandfather's legal heir, he controlled all of the copyrights to the entire collection, including for those photographs taken by his father.

I eventually decided to have the slides digitized as a Father's Day gift for my Dad, after which I agreed to terms with Erdody and handed off all of the slides to him. Initially, I thought about this project as simply a way to make the slides conveniently accessible to my father, and after receiving the digital surrogates from Erdody I began uploading them to Flickr for this purpose in May 2014. While doing this, I realized that there was tremendous potential for the further sharing of these digitized photographs, so I asked my father if he would be willing to release them under a Creative Commons license so I could also upload them to Wikimedia Commons. He graciously agreed to this proposal and released them freely under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license, which is conveniently supported by Flickr.

My father's motivation for freely licensing these images was rooted in the fact that his slides had been underused prior to their digitization; in his own words, they had been "tucked away with other family artifacts" and only ever brought out of storage "every dozen years or so". Further explaining his rationale, he noted that "I was proud of the quality of most of the photos, and thought there was no better way to honor the work of my father than to make his photos available for public use."

In less than a year since they were uploaded, my father's donation of 146 original images (now 151 total files, including retouched derivatives) to Wikimedia Commons has certainly benefited the Wikimedia community, as over 10% have already been added to Wikipedia articles (chiefly but not exclusively on English Wikipedia). Interestingly but not surprisingly, my father's decision to freely license these images has also benefited him directly in the form of both subject identification and color correction, largely thanks to Wikimedians Mackensen and MagentaGreen, respectively. By voluntarily releasing his collection of railroad slides into the commons, my father has benefited from the volunteered efforts of other users while also enriching the content of both Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia.

In light of my experience with this digitization project, I believe that motivations for freely licensing older analog personal photographs are very similar to those for contemporary digital photographs, including the motivations that catalyzed my own personal photographic contributions to Wikimedia Commons back in the mid to late 2000s. The economics of their creation appear to be essentially the same, necessitating only a camera and the desire and ability to take photographs, often as a hobby; I believe that this makes the amateur analog photographer's decision to freely release his or her images very similar to the equivalent decision made by contemporary amateur digital photographers. The major challenge, however, is the cost and equipment required to digitize these images before they can be uploaded or freely licensed. While the cost is not insignificant, from my experience it is not prohibitive either ($0.50 per slide in my case), which for me at least made it a feasible and affordable gift idea.

From my personal experience I would certainly recommend A2Digital, although according to Erdody it is a "strictly local service"; while he told me that he would be willing to "receive materials by mail from anywhere", he also described the idea of mailing slides or similar analog materials back and forth for digitization as "very risky" (emphasis in the original). As a protective measure, he recommends that his customers deliver their materials to him by hand, which is precisely what I did. While this worked perfectly well for me as an Ann Arbor resident, it simply will not suffice for the rest of the world.

Due to the fragility of the medium in question, successfully digitizing slides nonetheless requires, as Erdody terms it, "a grassroots solution". Asking your local library or historical society about how they digitize slides or negatives is probably the best place to start. Although not terribly common, according to Erdody, some libraries do provide lists of their digitization vendors; an example is the state-run Library of Michigan in Lansing, which maintains this webpage on the subject. Perhaps the easiest way to locate such a service, however, is to simply search the Internet for "slide digitization" and the name of your city, town, or the nearest metropolitan area. However you find a slide digitizer, though, I'd highly recommend that you explore the possibility of digitizing any slides you may have of potential interest to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. In terms of the final results in my case, I think that my father said it best: "I know my Dad would be pleased and proud to know that his work was finally being enjoyed and appreciated by railfans (and others) all over the world."

• 
  The Illinois Central's Green Diamond at Kankakee, Illinois (August 1964)
• 
  The Pennsylvania Railroad's Pennsylvania Limited at Plymouth, Indiana (July 1963)
• 
  The Santa Fe's Grand Canyon Limited at Joliet, Illinois (August 1963)
• 
  A Gulf, Mobile, & Ohio train at Joliet, Illinois (August 1963)

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-25/In focus Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-25/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-25/Humour

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