Open letter to publishers | Open Citations and Semantic Publishing

"Today I wrote an open letter to all scholarly journal publishers, available online here, entitled: 'Open your article reference lists for inclusion in the Open Citations Corpus.'  In this letter, I request that publishers open the bibliographic citation data in their journal article reference lists.  There is a growing movement to make such bibliographic citation data open – for example, Nature Publishing Group’s open Linked Data Platform now includes citation metadata for all published article references. Provided a publisher is already depositing article references with CrossRef as part of the CrossRef CitedBy Linking service, all the publisher need to do is to inform CrossRef that it is willing for CrossRef to freely distribute these reference, for example in response to queries against the CrossRef XML API.  We will then harvest them from CrossRef and incorporate them as open linked data in the Open Citations Corpus. Nature Publishing Group, Taylor & Francis, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (who publish Science) and Oxford University Press, as well as a number of open-access publishers, have already given their consent to CrossRef to do this for some or all of their journals. If not already a subscriber to the CrossRef CitedBy Linking service, a publisher can register for this useful service free of charge.  Having done so, there is nothing further the publisher needs to do to ‘open’ its reference data, other than to give its consent to CrossRef. Even Open Access publishers, publishing articles under a CC-By open license, need to give this specific permission to CrossRef for this to occur, because CrossRef policy is that all publishers, including open access publishers, have to opt in to any distribution of references that CrossRef makes. There is a CrossRef announcement to this effect at http://crossref.zendesk.com/entries/21071901-new-feature-distributing-references, and a draft e-mail for making such a request, addressed to support@crossref.org, appended to my open letter. I have copied this open letter to the CEOs of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), and of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), asking them to distribute it to their members, perhaps in association with their next Members News Letter, as CrossRef itself is planning to do later this month..."