Setting Your Cites on Open | PLOS Biologue

"We approached several publishers and many of them made the decision to open up their reference data very quickly. Others are still in discussion, but our hope is that we have a critical mass of publishers doing this now, and so others will easily be able to follow suit. Six months ago, before the initiative started, only 1% of the citation data hosted by Crossref was publicly available. Today – with the pioneering publishers and the recent agreement of the American Geophysical Union, Association for Computing Machinery, BMJ, Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, EMBO Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, SAGE Publishing, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley, it’s reached 40% (the full list is available on the I4OC website). That amounts to almost 14 million publications with open references.

Why are publishers doing this now? It’s partly because publishers are beneficiaries, given the potential to increase the discoverability and usage of their content, but also because it is so very easy (a simple email to Crossref does the trick and then citations can be set to open in a matter of a day or two). Another factor is that when the first couple of publishers indicated their intention to do this and gave us permission to tell others it increased everyone’s confidence.  A deadline also provided momentum: we wanted to announce I4OC at a certain time and include as many publishers as possible in that announcement.

The depth of interest in these data is indicated by the stakeholders who have endorsed the initiative, including funders such as, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, institutions such as the California Digital Library and the Max Planck Digital Library, as well as existing service providers such as Altmetric, Dryad, Figshare, ImpactStory and the Internet Archive. It’s important to note that datasets are also increasingly being cited – they too can become part of the open citation corpus.

These data, once openly available, are completely free to reuse. The impact cannot be overstated. Researchers, funders, librarians, publishers, policy makers or any interested person will be able to  explore the data. In an impoverished world where citation data is most infamously used for deriving the impact factor of a journal, fully open data will allow the creation of new, transparent and reproducible methods with which to evaluate and study research. The data will also be subject to independent scrutiny and quality control and should foster competition for new tools and services – to everyone’s benefit.

The initial success of I4OC is down to the small band of collaborators who got it off the ground, the publishers who have rapidly decided to share their citation data openly, and the stakeholders who have backed the strength of the idea. Now let’s set our sights on getting closer to 100% open citation data, and creating a publicly available corpus as described on the I4OC homepage. Although it might take years, we are now well on the way to building and curating a well-structured, open database of literally millions of datapoints that anyone can query, mine, consume and explore. "