Open Access News

Can an information source that is free also be reliable? Or does the price of content always reflect its value?

In higher education, this debate usually takes place in the context of academic publishing, where open access journals have emerged to challenge their pricey print predecessors. ...

The same narrative is playing out in the world of scholarly reference works. Encyclopedia Britannica, the genre’s sturdiest brand, has been marginalized in the Internet age by Wikipedia and Google — tools it dismisses as untrustworthy. Quality, Britannica says, comes at a price: $69.95 per year for Web access, to be exact ($1,349 if you want the bound volumes). ...

Meanwhile, a number of academic institutions are quietly trying to do what Britannica and others say can’t be done: build online encyclopedias that are rigorous, scholarly, and free to access. ...

The first challenge of building an encyclopedia that is both free and scholarly, therefore, is finding a way to enlist expert contributors and qualified editors cheaply without compromising the rigor of the editorial process.

Eugene M. Izhikevich says the answer is to make contributing a privilege. Izhikevich, a former senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, is editor-in-chief of Scholarpedia — a free, “peer-reviewed” online compendium. But unlike Britannica, Scholarpedia does not pay its experts for writing and overseeing entries.

The key to attracting voluntary labor, says Izhikevich, is by persuading experts that their contributions will be lasting, and that by participating they will be peopled with intellectual royalty. ...

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which also does not pay its writers, has managed to work the prestige angle to mobilize a willing corps of more than 1,700 unpaid contributors. ...

In the absence of pay and a traditional clip for the tenure file, [SEP associate editor Colin] Allen has had to emphasize different incentives when coaxing busy professors to volunteer their time to the project. First of all, he points out that an entry in a free, Web-based encyclopedia is likely to be read by more people than an article in an expensive, narrowly tailored journal. And unlike Wikipedia, or more conventional encyclopedias, they’ll get a byline. ...

Achieving [Wikipedia's] sort of breadth while being free and expertly fact-checked is a daunting prospect. Most of the free encyclopedia projects that have come out of academe are limited by topic: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology and so on. Even Scholarpedia, whose name and tagline (“the peer-reviewed, open-access encyclopedia”) implies a broad scope, currently only publishes articles on a few specialized topics in science. Other free, online encyclopedias supported by universities, such as the Encyclopedia Virginia, the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, limit themselves to a single state and focus mostly on history. ...

Citizendium, a free encyclopedia project started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, aims for both comprehensiveness and rigorous editorial oversight; but it has managed to publish only 121 "expert-approved" articles since it went live in early 2007. The approval queue is 12,790 articles long. ...

Like a lot of free-content sites, most of these encyclopedia projects are still grappling with funding anxieties.

Since neither the New Georgia Encyclopedia nor Encyclopedia Virginia earn any revenue, both depend on foundation grants and their state governments. ...

The Encyclopedia of Egyptology, based at the University of California at Los Angeles, has to employ salaried editors since “many of the authors are non-native speakers of English, and the texts require often substantial corrections,” according to its editor, Willeke Wendrich ...

Of all the free encyclopedia projects identified by Inside Higher Ed, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the closest to sustainability; Edward N. Zalta, the editor, says it has squirreled away about 75 percent of the $4 million endowment it estimates it needs to be completely self-reliant.

To make it that far, Zalta and his collaborators had to get clever. A key fund-raising strategy has been getting libraries to pay “membership dues” even though the whole thing is available online. ... Zalta has been able to sell it as an investment in open access — a cause many libraries, frustrated by the rising prices of academic journals, have been happy to support, he says. ...