Crossref as a source of open bibliographic metadata

Abstract:  Several initiatives have been taken to promote the open availability of bibliographic metadata of scholarly publications in Crossref. We present an up-to-date overview of the availability of six metadata elements in Crossref: reference lists, abstracts, ORCIDs, author affiliations, funding information, and license information. Our analysis shows that the availability of these metadata elements has improved over time, at least for journal articles, the most common publication type in Crossref. However, the analysis also shows that many publishers need to make additional efforts to realize full openness of bibliographic metadata.