Availability of open reference data nears 50% as major societies and influential publishers endorse the Initiative for Open Citations

"n the days immediately following the launch of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) in April this year, some major names in scholarly publishing made the decision to release their reference data into the public domain. Three months on, a further 16 publishers have added their names to the list and the percentage of articles with open reference data has moved from 40% to over 45%. That’s more than 16 million articles with open references.

Among the 20 publishers who contribute the largest amount of citation data, those who are making their citation data freely available, now include: AIP Publishing, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Physical Society, De Gruyter, Emerald, and SciELO. They join Wiley, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and many others who made their reference data available prior to, or as part of, the launch of I4OC. Out of the 20 largest contributors, 13 publishers have now moved their reference data into the public domain, and discussions are ongoing with several other publishers."