The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is a project launched publicly in April 2017, that describes itself as: "a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data and to make these data available." It is intended to facilitate improved

citation analysis Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents. It uses the directed graph of citations — links from one document to another document — to reveal properties of the documents. A t ...

Methodology

The citations are stored in Crossref and are made available through the Crossref REST API. They are also available from the OpenCitations Corpus, a database that harvests citation data from Crossref and other sources. The data are considered by those involved in the Initiative to be in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired ...

, and so a CC0 licence is used. The stated benefits of this approach are: 1.

discoverability Discoverability is the degree to which something, especially a piece of content or information, can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system. Discoverability is a concern in library and information science, many aspects ...

of published content; 2. the building of new services, and 3. creation of a public citation graph to explore connections between knowledge fields. The

Royal Society of Chemistry The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is a learned society (professional association) in the United Kingdom with the goal of "advancing the chemical sciences". It was formed in 1980 from the amalgamation of the Chemical Society, the Royal Inst ...

earmarked the I4OC as a feature of excellence in publishing, and

IOP Publishing IOP Publishing (previously Institute of Physics Publishing) is the publishing company of the Institute of Physics. It provides publications through which scientific research is distributed worldwide, including journals, community websites, maga ...

participates to implement their commitment to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment.

Launch

The initiative was established in response to a paper on

citation A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose o ...

s in

Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license ...

, ''Citations needed for the sum of all human knowledge: Wikidata as the missing link between scholarly publishing and

linked open data In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but r ...

'', given by Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

, at the eighth Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, in September 2016. At that time, only 1% of papers in Crossref had citations metadata that were freely available. By the time of the public launch, on 6 April 2017, that had risen to 40% as a result of setting up the initiative. The founding partners were: * OpenCitations *

PLOS PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012 ) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and laun ...

eLife ''eLife'' is a not-for-profit, peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal for the biomedical and life sciences. It was established at the end of 2012 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society, and Wellcome Trust, following a w ...

DataCite DataCite is an international not-for-profit organization which aims to improve '' data citation'' in order to: *establish easier access to research data on the Internet *increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to ...

* The Centre for Culture and Technology at

Curtin University Curtin University, formerly known as Curtin University of Technology and Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT), is an Australian public research university based in Bentley, Perth, Western Australia. It is named after John Curtin, ...

At the time of launch, 64 organisations, including the

Wellcome Trust The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of one of the predecessors of Glaxo ...

, the

Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a merging of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was l ...

and the

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is an American philanthropic nonprofit organization. It was established in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of General Motors. The Sloan Foundation makes grants to suppor ...

, had endorsed the project and as of May, 2017, Sloan Foundation confirmed it would be providing funding. 29 of these organisations were publishers who had agreed to share their citation metadata openly. These include

Springer Nature Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and M ...

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group is an international company originating in England that publishes books and academic journals. Its parts include Taylor & Francis, Routledge, F1000 Research or Dovepress. It is a division of Informa plc, a United Ki ...

, and Wiley. On 11 July 2017, the Initiative announced that a further sixteen publishers had signed up. On 8 August 2017, the Initiative released on open letter to stakeholders. The same month, the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the Briti ...

became a member organisation.

Growth

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', '' Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

, who contribute 30% of the citation metadata in Crossref, did not initially join the initiative. In April 2017, Elsevier's vice-president of corporate relations, Tom Reller, said: In January 2019, the Editorial board of Elsevier's '' Journal of Informetrics'' resigned and launched the new journal ''Quantitative Science Studies'', citing Elsevier's lack of support for the I4OC as one of the main reasons for the move. Elsevier claimed in response that they could not release their data for free due to loss of licensing revenue from their proprietary

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top- ...

citation services. Elsevier finally joined the initiative in January 2021 after the data was already available with an

Open Data Commons Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...

license in Microsoft Academic. In August 2022, the number of articles whose reference lists were free to access and reuse exceeded 60 million, out of 134 million articles indexed by Crossref.

References

External links

*
Video of Taraborelli's 2016 presentation
''Citations needed for the sum of all human knowledge: Wikidata as the missing link between scholarly publishing and linked open data''
Slides for the above
on

Figshare Figshare is an online open access repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos. It is free to upload content and free to access, in adherence to the principle of open ...

{{open access navbox Open access projects 2017 establishments Citation indices Open science

Methodology

Launch

Growth

See also

References

External links