BioMed Central Blog
Wikipedia and open access journals - now more compatible than ever
A couple of years ago, I posted a blog noting the complementarity between Wikipedia (which excludes original research from its scope, but strongly encourages citation of original sources), and open access journals which publish original research which Wikipedia authors can easily cite, and which Wikipedia readers can reliably follow links to gain access to.
So I was especially happy to hear the new complementarity just got even better, with the announcement last month that Wikipedia's content will soon be switching from its current licensing scheme (the GNU Free Documentation License) to a Creative Commons license – specifically the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA).
This new license chosen by Wikipedia is a variant of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which is used by BioMed Central and many other open access publishers. The difference between the two is that the version used by Wikipedia requires that any derived work that includes the material must be similarly licensed.
What this means in practice is that it is now straightforward, from a licensing perspective, for any organization whether commercial or non-commercial to create derivative works incorporating both open access research articles and Wikipedia content, and to distribute these combined works under the CC-BY-SA license. The Creative Commons website even includes a handy license compatibility wizard to work out what can be combined and how it can be relicensed.
As Wikipedia and open access journals continue to grow, the academic, educational and indeed commercial possibilities opened up by this rapidly expanding resource of freely licensable content are truly exciting.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 17:59 Comments (1)
Posted by Ding One on June 12, 2009 at 07:06 PM BST #