01/25/2017

Bringing the Cathedral to the Bazaar: Academic Content and Wikipedia

Making truth widely accessible is more important now than ever

Last November, Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” 2016’s international word of the year, based in part on a 2,000-percent year-over-year increase in the word’s usage. Many are wary of consuming information online in a digital environment rife with fake news and click-bait headlines. Scholarly publishers and librarians have a responsibility to help readers overcome their fears, delivering high-quality, reliable content and going the extra mile to make truth widely accessible.

At JSTOR, a not-for-profit digital library of humanities and social science content created in partnership with thousands of publishers and libraries, we are working through our main platform and our JSTOR Daily magazine to bring peer-reviewed academic content to the mainstream. Three of our initiatives relate to Wikipedia – the 6th most used site on the internet, per Alexa. These include: our editors’ access program, new JSTOR topic pages, and support for campaigns like #1Lib1Ref – all of which aim to expand access to peer-reviewed research globally. I want to share our approach, so that publishers and libraries might adopt or be inspired by how these initiatives can be useful in the mission to increase reach of scholarly content and to combat “post-truth” assertions.

Please click here to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.