Opening Up Research Citations: A Q&A with Dario Taraborelli | Wiley

"Q. What are the aims of the I4OC?

A. A number of curated citation databases have been available to universities and funding bodies via subscriptions for years. However, these databases don't allow any kind of reuse or reproducible data analysis due to the restrictive nature of their licenses. There are also prominent citation databases with more permissive licenses, such as the Microsoft Academic Graph, or the recently announced Springer Nature SciGraph, but they also limit reuse through noncommercial licenses.

The Initiative for Open Citations was designed to promote the availability of citation data with no copyright or usage restriction whatsoever. To achieve this goal, we are asking scholarly publishers depositing reference data to Crossref to make this data openly available in the public domain. Before I4OC, only 1% of publications with reference metadata deposited in Crossref made this data openly available. As of the launch of the initiative, this number is 40% and growing.

Q. What do you see as being the key benefits for authors and researchers of a fully open citation dataset?

A. The availability of this data benefits authors, researchers, funding and evaluation bodies, publishers, and the general public alike.

• Authors will have consistent, machine-readable access to references for all their publications;
• Researchers will be able to use this resource to study the dissemination of methods and scientific ideas, the genesis and provenance of scholarly knowledge;
• Funders will be able to rely on a public resource to develop transparent and reproducible evaluation metrics, and new tools to assess the academic and societal impact of research they fund;
• Publishers will benefit from the increased discoverability of publications that this data provides, and tools built on it.
• The public will be able to use this data to trace knowledge back to its sources or reuse it in open knowledge repositories such as Wikipedia and Wikidata."