The longer Elsevier refuses to make their citations open, the clearer it becomes that their high…

"The Open Citations movement is something I’ve been watching with interest. It hasn’t really broken through into the mainstream yet, like Open Access has, because it’s a bit of a more complex topic and the benefits of it aren’t readily apparent. The main idea behind it is that publishers should add all the listed references for an article (i.e. the sources being cited by that article) to that article’s metadata and make this citation data open on platforms like Crossref....

The benefits of Open Citations are clear right? So what’s the hold up? Why don’t we have this now? Well, it’s time we return to an ongoing theme of this blog which is trying to guilt trip Elsevier into doing the right thing. All the large scholarly publishers (Wiley, Springer, Taylor and Francis, Sage) are now providing open references to Crossref. You can search Crossref Participation Reports yourself and see. Elsevier is the only one holding out....

Elsevier is between a rock and hard place here. They’re the only scholarly publisher with a citation database tool like Scopus. Every other publisher gets a clear benefit from opening up their citations, but for Elsevier it threatens the number of subscriptions to Scopus. With Open Citations, a tool like Scopus becomes less valuable, but if they keep their citations closed they’re directly impeding the progress of research....

If Scopus is actually, truly, threatened by open citations, then isn’t it clear that this is a tool that only existed because of Elsevier created artificial scarcity to grow their profit margin? ..."