Milestone for I4OC – open references at Crossref exceed 50%

The analyses show that, of 956,050,193 references from journal articles stored at Crossref, 486,041,671 (50.84%) are now in the category “Open”, and are freely available for third parties to download and use for any purpose.

This is a significant milestone for the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC, https://i4oc.org/), which since early 2017 has been campaigning for scholarly publishers to open their reference lists, and a major gain for the world of open scholarship.