ASAP Awards – Interview With Daniel Mietchen

The names of the six finalists for the ASAP awards are now out, and I was pleased to see Daniel Mietchen’s name in the list. Daniel Mietchen, Raphael Wimmer and Nils Dagsson Moskopp have been working on a really valuable project. There was an opportunity in exploiting open access literature to illustrate articles in Wikipedia.

Many scientific articles have a “supplementary” materials section, which can be rich in multimedia, but these artifacts may not as easy to find as those that make up the main body of scientific manuscripts. What Daniel, Raphael and Nils did is maximise the impact of those research outputs by putting them in a place where they can be found, explored and reused by scientists and non-scientists alike.

They developed a tool called Open Access Media Importer (OAMI) that searches for multimedia files through Open Access articles in PubMed Central and uploads them to WIkimedia. This tool exemplifies the added value of papers published under open access using a libre copyright licence such as CC-BY. Not only are the articles available to read, but also they can be repurposed in other contexts. The files that the OAMI bot uploaded now illustrate more than 200 English Wikipedia pages, and many more in other languages.