Abstract
The popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is an important and influential platform that assists with the communication of science to a global audience. Using data obtained from <a href="http://altmetric.com/" target="_blank">Altmetric.com</a> and Unpaywall, we looked at research from the White Rose Universities (Sheffield, Leeds and York) that is cited on Wikipedia. Of that research, we explored what percentage of citations were available open access (OA) and the location of those citations to ascertain whether they were hosted by publishers or within OA repositories. This article explores the importance of access to OA research within such an important and leading platform as Wikipedia and how well it supports effective scientific communication across society.
Highlights
The purpose of the work undertaken was to investigate how much of the research published by the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York is cited in Wikipedia and what proportion of those citations are linked to an open access (OA) version
Wikipedia page entries and embedded citations were collected by Altmetric.com using unique identifiers within the research such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), PubMed ID or ISBN, this included the date the research was cited within a Wikipedia entry
Research from the University of Sheffield had 2,523 Wikipedia citations, which was marginally more than Leeds, with 2,406 citations
Summary
The purpose of the work undertaken was to investigate how much of the research published by the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York is cited in Wikipedia and what proportion of those citations are linked to an open access (OA) version. We propose that making the cited academic literature point to OA versions as standard helps support the foundations of existing and future Wikipedia entries. Increasing the number of OA citations within Wikipedia assists the online encyclopaedia’s goal of access to transparent and evidence-based knowledge and removes any barriers to access to research, which is good for academics. We considered which were OA and whether access to them was available via the universities’ or a third-party OA repository or via a publisher’s website. We chose the White Rose Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York due to their shared
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