February 10: The two Requests for comment on using icons in citation templates to signal accessibility of the cited sources have been closed. One of them was concerned with the behaviour of the citation templates, the other one with the design of the icons. In both cases, consensus was not clear, though some aspects could be agreed upon.
November 9: The open license text reuse tool for the Visual Editor toolbar originally proposed in June is reposted as part of the community wishlist.
November 1: The Open Access Media Importer crosses the mark of 30,000 uploads after expanding in scope and uploading over 7000 multimedia files to Wikimedia Commons within a few days.
Lock-green
October 29: Citation templates on the English Wikipedia have been updated so they can now signal the accessibility of cited sources. References cited via their PubMed Central ID automatically get a green OA lock.
June 25: a paper on how scholarly references are cited on Wikipedia concludes "the chief effect of open access policies may be to significantly amplify the diffusion of science, through an intermediary like Wikipedia"
Openly licensed media indexed in PubMed Central in May 2013 by media type.
April 1: A JATS-Con talk discusses technical aspects of importing open-access materials from PubMed Central into Wikimedia projects on an automated basis. (traffic stats).
A white fish with dark spots, Xanthichthys ringens.
January 19: An op-ed in the Wikipedia Signpost presents the Signalling OA-ness project to a wider audience and contains a demo of how it might fit with both the NISO recommendations and existing Wikimedia workflows for handling references, especially with signalling full text available via Wikisource, media via Wikimedia Commons and metadata via Wikidata.
A cake for Wikipedia's 13th birthday
January 15: On the 13th birthday of Wikipedia, two posts on the Wikimedia blog discuss access to the scholarly literature in the context of Wikimedia projects. The first one concentrates on The Wikipedia Library and its efforts to provide Wikipedia authors with read access to quality sources in order to improve and expand Wikipedia content. The second one focuses specifically on Open Access and how the Wikimedia and Open Access communities have interacted over the years. Both form part of the Wikimedia contributions to Copyright Week, a week of actions around copyright legislation, led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Logo of WikiProject Open Access
January 10: WikiProject Open Access was created on this day in 2012. It now counts about 60 members who oversee about 260 articles on the English Wikipedia as well as about 23,000 files on Wikimedia Commons, about 6,000 of which are used some 66,000 times across 300 Wikimedia projects, gathering around 30 million monthly page views.
A tardigrade rearranging itself in response to removal and addition of water
January 6: The NISO Workgroup on Open Access Metadata and Indicators have released a draft of recommendations for how to signal use and reuse rights of scholarly publications. These consist of a <free_to_read> tag intended to signal whether and when a publication is available publicly without a requirement for payment or registration, and a <license_ref> tag intended to point to a URI containing the licensing terms. The draft is open for public comments until February 4. Wikipedia:WikiProject Open Access is exploring how such signalling could work in a Wikipedia/ Wikimedia context.
Microscopic image series of degrading fluorescence indicating chromosome rearrangements during meiosis
September 30: A paper on how inconsistent XML delivered by publishers to PubMed Central hinders the reuse of open-access materials by automated tools like the Open Access Media Importer is now available on the NCBI Bookshelf. It shall be presented at JATS-Con at the NIH on October 22.
September 26: The BaGLAMa reports with page view stats for August are out, indicating 31 million visits across 210 Wikimedia projects to a total of 56k article pages that use images or media from the Commons category Open access (publishing).
September 18: According to GLAMorous (WebCite copy), over 300 Wikimedia projects now use materials from Category:Open access (publishing) on Wikimedia Commons, which currently has 21107 files, 5626 of which are used a total of 64326 times across Wikimedia platforms.
August 15: Wikipedia articles on the newly discovered mammal species of Bassaricyon neblina ("Olinguito") - whose formal description was published earlier today in ZooKeys - exist in 8 languages and are featured (with the image shown here) in the "in the news" sections of the Main Pages of the Catalan, English, Portuguese and Russian Wikipedias as well as in an article on the Polish Wikinews.
July 29: A bug inflating some of the GLAMorous stats has been fixed. For the Commons category Open access (publishing), the corrected version now indicates a total of 19683 files, 5266 of which have been used a total of 54308 times across 296 Wikimedia projects.
Female Hydrophylita emporos wasp hitchhiking on a female Psolodesmus mandarinus mandarinus damselfly.
July 11: The BaGLAMa reports with page view stats for June are out, indicating 35 million visits across 206 Wikimedia projects to a total of 47k article pages that use images or media from the Commons category Open access (publishing).
July 3: The GLAMorous tool has been ported to Wikimedia Labs. For the Commons category Open access (publishing), it indicates a total of 19218 files, 5111 of which have been used a total of 93839 times across 297 Wikimedia projects.
July 1: An abstract on "Inconsistent XML as a barrier to reuse of Open Access Content" has been accepted for JATS-Con at NCBI from October 22-23 (i.e. during Open Access Week). It documents how work on the Open Access Media Importer has been impeded by inconsistencies in the XML that publishers supply to PubMed Central.
June 30: The BaGLAMa reports with page view stats for May are out, indicating 39 million visits across 207 Wikimedia projects to a total of 45k article pages that use images or media from the Commons category Open access (publishing).
Sigmoidal increase of oxyhemoglobin in dog blood as a function of the partial pressure of oxygen.
February 8: The BaGLAMa reports with page view stats for January are out, indicating 42 million visits (up from 21 million last January) across 203 Wikimedia projects (up from 142) to a total of 39k article pages (up from 19k) that use images or media from the Commons category Open access (publishing).
Snoring interrupted by half a minute of sleep apnea.
A parasitized moth caterpillar, bent over the parasitoid wasp pupae that have egressed from it, defends itself and the parasitoid pupae against a stink bug with violent head-swings, resulting in the predator being knocked off the twig.
A parasitized moth caterpillar, bent over the parasitoid wasp pupae that have egressed from it, defends itself and the parasitoid pupae against a stink bug with violent head-swings, resulting in the predator being knocked off the twig.
October 29: The Bot request for the Open Access Media Importer has been approved. The bot will now routinely spider the biomedical literature deposited in PubMed Central for articles that are licensed compatibly with reuse on Wikimedia Commons and that have audio or video files in their supplementary materials. The videos featured under under Media of the Day on Commons this month have all been uploaded during the test phase of the bot.
October 23: Examples of reusing, revising, remixing and redistributing Open Access materials in the context of Wikimedia projects are being highlighted in a blog post on the PLOS blog on the occasion of Open Access Week.
A mudskipper vocalizing in the presence of an intruder.
September 18: The article Lesula was featured on the Main Page of the Swedish Wikipedia after this new species of monkey (scientific name: Cercopithecus lomamiensis) had been described in PLOS ONE. Traffic stats.
August 22-25: The article on the green lacewing Semachrysa jade (see below for image) is featured on the Main Page of the Russian Wikipedia. Traffic stats.
Combat between two forked fungus beetle (Bolitotherus cornutus) males.