The problem Text-mining - the art of answering questions by extracting patterns, data, etc. out of the published literature - is not easy. It’s made incredibly difficult because of publishers. It is a fact that the vast majority of publicly funded research across the globe is published in paywall journals.

On 9th January 2018, I published a World View article in Nature entitled ***Funders should mandate open citations ***[1], in which I argue that access to open references from scholarly publications is so important that, when encouragements from organisations such as the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) to publishers to open their references fall on deaf ears, then sterner measures are required.

Two significant barriers prevent comprehensive reference availability through Crossref. The first barrier First, two-thirds of Crossref’s publisher-members, in particular the smaller ones, do not submit references along with the other details of their publications. Many of these published works are of types (e.g. abstracts, editorials and news items) that lack any references.

Since 1st January 2018, Crossref has had a new reference distribution policy, described at https://www.crossref.org/reference-distribution/. There are three possible options for setting the reference distribution preference from which a publisher can choose, these being ‘Closed’, ‘Limited’ and ’Open“. If the ‘Closed’ option is chosen, the references will only be used for the Crossref Cited-by service, and are not distributed via any of the

In der aktuellen Debatte über Vor- und Nachteile von APCs und der Transformation zu OA, wird häufig unterschlagen, dass in einigen Disziplinen bereits schon seit langer Zeit APCs in teils beachtlicher Höhe bezahlt werden. Dies haben aber NICHTS mit Open Access zu tun.

The year is almost over and it’s time to review the highlights of GigaScience ’s 2017. “Draft genome of the reindeer (Rangifer tarandus)”Foto: Alexandre Buisse CC-BY-SA 3.0 2017 was as special year for GigaScience : a year of many firsts and we celebrated our 5th birthday! An occasion to look back – and forward, as we did in our anniversary editorial.

[The PubMed Central International (PMCI) network is a collaborative effort between the PMCI repositories, publishers, and funding organisations that wish to preserve and provide free access to journal articles authored by the researchers they support. For many years, the PMCI network has consisted of three nodes, PMC USA, Europe PMC and PMC Canada.

Current estimates for the cost of subscription articles converge around US$5,000 per article. This number is reached by dividing the estimated US$10b spent on subscriptions annually world-wide by the two million published articles every year. Current initiatives aiming for a transition from subscriptions to gold (article processing charges, APC-based) open access emphasize that the transition has to be cost–neutral.

For completeness, this post, also based on analyses performed by Daniel Ecer of eLife (<d.ecer@elifesciences.org)> on data he downloaded from Crossref in September 2017 (Ecer, 2017), complements the two preceding posts, and details the openness of references from scholarly publishers other than Elsevier.

Yesterday (November 23rd 2017) I was working with Daniel Ecer of eLife (<d.ecer@elifesciences.org)> to dig some hard facts out of the analyses he undertook on data he downloaded from Crossref in September 2017 (Ecer, 2017).  Because of its dominant position in the scholarly publishing world, in this, the second of two related posts, I report the results for references from works published by Elsevier.