Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) launches with early success

"Six organizations today announced the establishment of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC): OpenCitations, the Wikimedia Foundation, PLOS, eLife, DataCite, and the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University.

Until recently, the vast majority of citation data were not openly available, even though all major publishers freely share their metadata through the foundational infrastructure provided by Crossref. Before I4OC started, only about 1% of the publications with reference data deposited in Crossref made their references freely available. Now, that figure will jump to 40%.[1] In recent months, several publishers have made the decision to release these metadata publicly, including 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. These decisions stem from discussions that have been taking place since a call-to-action to open up citations was made by Dario Taraborelli of the Wikimedia Foundation at the 2016 OASPA Conference on Open-Access Publishing. These publishers join other publishers who have been opening their references through Crossref for some time (see full list).

The purpose of I4OC is to coordinate these efforts and to promote the creation of a comprehensive, freely-available corpus of scholarly citation data. Such a corpus will be valuable for new as well as existing services, and will allow many more interested parties to explore, mine, and reuse the data for new knowledge.

The key benefits that arise from a fully open citation dataset include:

The key benefits that arise from a fully open citation dataset include: 1. The establishment of a global public web of linked scholarly citation data to enhance the discoverability of published content, both subscription access and open access. This will particularly benefit individuals who are not members of academic institutions with subscriptions to commercial citation databases. 2. The ability to build new services over the open citation data, for the benefit of publishers, researchers, funding agencies, academic institutions and the general public, as well as enhancing existing services. 3. The creation of a public citation graph to explore connections between knowledge fields, and to follow the evolution of ideas and scholarly disciplines."