GLAM/Newsletter/April 2013/Contents/Open Access report

This Month in GLAM – Volume III, Issue IV, April 2013

Open Access report

Featured content; Wikimania sessions

Pictures featured both ways between Wikimedia Commons and OA journals

From Commons to OA:
Pachypodium rosulatum.
From OA to Commons:
Cicindela marginata.

On April 24, the frontpage of the journal PeerJ displayed an image of the flower Pachypodium rosulatum in order to highlight a new article that had been published on the species. This image - by User:Daderot - had been available from Wikimedia Commons since 2009. An attribution would have been nice, but since Daderot had placed the file into the Public Domain, that is OK.

Two days earlier, a photograph of the tiger beetle Cicindela marginata had achieved Featured picture status on Commons (nomination). The image had originally been published in an article by Yves Bousquet in ZooKeys. It is the fourth file from an Open Access source to be featured on Commons, and the first since 2009. Further potential candidates that meet the technical requirements are listed here.

At least three previous Featured picture candidates from Open Access sources had not been promoted:

Open Access materials on the Dutch Wikipedia

The Dutch Wikipedia is the fifth one to use files from the Commons category Open access (publishing) more than 1000 times. The German and French Wikipedias as well as Wikispecies had reached that milestone earlier this year, whereas the English and Vietnamese ones had passed it long ago, mostly due to their heavy use of stub templates, many of which contain images, including some from Open Access sources.

WikiProject Open Access membership

Six new members have registered with WikiProject Open Access in April - more than in any previous month. In total, the project had 38 members by the end of the month, handling 325 pages altogether.

Wikimania submissions

The submissions for Wikimania 2013 include three that are directly relevant to Open Access: a panel on Open Access & Wikipedia as well as presentations on Wikimedia and Open Access (broader in scope than the panel) and on the Open Access Media Importer.

Open Access Media Importer

Plugin for images

In its current version, the bot uploads only audio and video files. There are many more image files in Open Access articles, and a good number - but by far not all - appear to be usable in Wikimedia projects, so a variant that allows an automated upload of selected images to Commons is currently being discussed.

Categorization

So far, a few hundred files uploaded and pre-categorized by the bot have undergone a review of the categorization. Thousands are still waiting for this treatment. Conversely, on the order of 2000 categories have been created to accommodate files uploaded by the bot, with a few hundred still to be done.

Gallery

The following represents a selection of the 279 files that have been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month, bringing the total over 11,000. If you can think of wiki pages where these files could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.