As the number of tools and platforms in open scholarship proliferates (see "101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication"),79 there has been increased attention to ownership, portability and interoperability, and lock-in. Groups supporting "community-owned" or "academy-owned" scholarly infrastructure are investing in open source publishing platforms, preprints, and scholarly annotation tools. Wikidata is community-owned. It stores structured data that has open, reusable licenses, which makes the Wikidata knowledge base part of the open "connective tissue" that can help transcend particular tools and power discovery and integration of scholarship.
Scholarly Communication Exemplars
Wikidata is being used as a means of documenting and surfacing researchers, publications and research data in a number of ways. It provides an opportunity for sharing faculty scholarship on an open and accessible platform. The following are examples of current initiatives, tools, and use cases related to Wikidata:
- WikiCite: "a Wikimedia initiative to develop a database of open citations and linked bibliographic data to serve free knowledge."80 The WikiCite initiative has brought together a community of Wikidata contributors, open access advocates, and library metadata professionals, to model source materials (including journal articles and books) that can be used as structured data citations for Wikimedia projects and other platforms. The goal is to create the "Sum of All Citations." At the time of this paper's writing, the WikiCite data set now includes nearly 7 billion triples (subject-predicate-object) and over 150 million citation relationships among the works collected.81 To date, there have been three WikiCite conferences, bringing together Wikimedia contributors and community members, linked data professionals, and librarians to discuss and develop the future of bibliographic data on Wikidata. There are planned future events as well as a discussion mailing list that any interested people can join.82
