User:Wiki at Royal Society John/April to July 14 Report

April saw no events booked, and also a double move in the adminstrative offices at the Royal Society (up a floor for a while, then back down after refurbishment was done). Most staff were encouraged to work at home so I only went in for meetings. I continued to work on setting up the things that would happen in May and June, such as the Royal Society Journals subscriptions offer, which went live in early May. Also on seeing what images could be released.

Images

Because the RS has recently invested in a considerable amount of digitization, and boosted its efforts in terms of picture sales, and is therefore still unsure which images have commercial potential, the timing was far from ideal, and most major categories of images, such as historic manuscripts and portraits of Fellows, could not be released. The major successes were agreement that from 2014 the photos taken of new Fellows (50 plus 9 foreign members for 2014) would be by default released on open licences and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. It is intended that this will continue in future years. The photos are taken at the Induction Day in July so will not be on Commons until after that. There may be some exceptions, where Fellows prefer to use an existing photo which cannot be released on an open licence, or say that they prefer their photos not to be released.

It turned out to be easier to arrange a special photo session in the Royal Society Library where a volunteer would take new photos of key manuscripts than to get the existing Library images released. User:Mike Peel very kindly agreed to undertake this and session in June resulted in Commons:Category:Royal Society Library, with over 50 photos of their treasures, mostly 17th century manuscripts, including several of Herschel's correspondence with Charles Babbage, Charles Blagden's diaries, the 1st edn of Sylva, by John Evelyn, one of the early minute books, Robert Boyle's notebooks etc, the manuscript fair copy of Newton's Principia etc. These are highly suitable for many high-traffic articles, but I have restricted myself in the big-name cases to leaving a note on the talk-page. A blogpost, and mailing-list postings, is planned for July to further publicise these. Given some time for diffusion, and when the GLAM toolset has bedded in, I expect these images to produce very respectable viewing figures.

Royal Society Journals subscriptions offer

RS Publishing kindly agreed to make subscriptions available for a year to selected Wikipedians through Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library. As all the publications are academic journals, with a high proportion of primary material, the number was initially restricted to 24 to ensure high-quality applicants. This turned out to be the right sort of number, and the applications, open throughout May, produced just about that number of applicants, of high quality. If this experiment is a success, it is likely to be continued in the future. For the purposes of the offer, the RS Journals were divided into 3 groups, for the biological and physical sciences, and history of science, with several journals in two groups.