Wikipedia:Annual Reviews

The Annual Reviews Wikipedian-in-Residence, MaryMO (AR), works to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of the sciences by citing expert articles from Annual Reviews' journals. Annual Reviews seeks to ensure responsible and valuable expansion of content on Wikipedia. If you have comments for Mary, please leave them on her talk page. The previous WIR in this role was Elysia (AR).

Who is Annual Reviews?

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit academic publisher, releasing annual volumes of review articles in fifty-one different subjects. Its articles are widely used on Wikipedia: Nearly 10,000 Wikipedia articles contain an Annual Reviews Digital Object Identifier (DOI), used to identify unique publications, including 125 Featured Articles and 300 Good Articles.

Annual Reviews' history on Wikipedia

Prior to 2016, Wikipedia editors who wished to use Annual Reviews publications as a source had to use unreliable tactics like emailing authors or looking for a free version on ResearchGate. In 2016, Annual Reviews donated 100 accounts to the Wikipedia Library (TWL) so that some volunteers could access their biomedical review articles for editing. In 2019, the donated accounts' access was broadened to all journals and their back volumes, or 40,000 articles in total, not just journals relevant to biomedical sciences.

When the Library Bundle was introduced by TWL in 2020, editors no longer had to apply individually for one of the 100 accounts. Instead, any editor can instantly access twenty-nine article collections, including Annual Reviews, if they meet basic criteria:

• Having an account at least six months old
• 500+ edits
• 10+ edits in the last month
• No active blocks

To see if you're eligible for the Library Bundle, visit the Library Card platform.

In addition to providing access to editors, we are rolling out an initiative that helps Wikipedia's readers. Readers looking to fact-check or learn more about an article’s contents may attempt to click through to the references. As of 2018, however, less than half of sources cited on Wikipedia had a freely readable version online somewhere. The 2020 volumes of five Annual Reviews journals were published Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license: Cancer Biology, Environment and Resources, Nuclear and Particle Science, Political Science, and Public Health. Additional journals are now becoming open access for the first time, with the goal of making all Annual Reviews journals open access under the Subscribe to Open (S2O) publishing model.

Changing a journal from gated access to open access sets the intention that all future volumes will be published open access. While older volumes of that journal are not relicensed to CC BY 4.0, Annual Reviews removes the paywalls for all back volumes.

Licensing restrictions mean that Wikipedians often have few images, if any, to illustrate articles (which may be of comically bad quality). Publishing open access has an added benefit in that most images from the newer volumes of these journals can be repurposed for Wikipedia (exceptions are noted in image captions).

For more information about the Subscribe to Open (S2O) publishing model, which allows publishers to convert to open access without article processing charges to authors, see the Subscribe-to-Open Community of Practice.