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Wikimedia Commons as an archive of sound and audiovisual materials from the scholarly literature

Title (author1): 
Dr
First names (author1): 
Daniel
Surname (author 1): 
Mietchen
Institution: 
Open Knowledge Foundation Germany
Country: 
GERMANY
Presentation type: 
spoken paper
Date: 
27 Sept Sunday
Start time: 
1 700
Venue: 
Belvedere 2
Abstract: 

The scholarly literature is mostly geared towards static, printable content, to the point that publications are still commonly called “papers”. Only very few of these papers come with any associated sound and audiovisual materials, typically relegated to the supplementary online information.
Driven by public access mandates from funders and institutions, the share of scholarly publications that are actually publicly available has grown considerably in recent years, facilitated by an ecosystem of disciplinary and institutional literature repositories. Audio or audiovisual content in these repositories is rarely presented in a way that would allow systematic exploration or immediate consumption, and while it could in principle be harvested and copied to places where this would be possible, barriers of a technical or legal nature often prevent that.
The biomedical literature repository PubMed Central uses the XML standard JATS that is intended to facilitate technical aspects of reuse, and part of PubMed Central's content is available under legal terms that allow for reusing, revising, remixing and redistributing the files. On that basis, it became possible to bring together audio and video materials from thousands of articles in hundreds of scholarly journals and to make them available via Wikimedia Commons, through which they can be reused on Wikipedia and its sister projects, where they reach a much wider audience than the initial publications do. The talk will present the workflows from the original publications to Wikipedia and highlight synergies with similar audio-related workflows originating at heritage institutions.