The JISC, in response to its invitation to tender, has recently funded Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Ltd, a research and strategy consultancy, to undertake an independent study entitled Access to Citation Data: A Cost-Benefit and Risk Review and Forward Look . Evidence gathering for the study has just started, and the consultants are due to produce a report on this subject by next February.
Bibliographic references are the links that knit together independent scholarly endeavours.
Why should the publishers of subscription-access journals, who presently generate income from the sale of access to peer-reviewed full text scholarly articles, be willingly open the reference lists of these articles, and contribute these to the Open Citations Corpus for publication as open linked data? I would like to suggest the following reasons: 1. There is a general move towards open data, which is widely regarded as a common good.
Data copied from JISC Expo DOAP (Description of a Project) spreadsheet at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ArsNASxXZiL6dC1mWWFMMjRWSmVha0E1WmdlQ05KcEE&hl=en#gid=7. Project title : The Open Citations Project Project tag : jiscopencite Short project description We will publish reference lists from Open Access biomedical journal articles as Linked Open Citation Data at
As part of the Open Citations Project, Alex Dutton recently completed a graphing plug-in for the Open Citations web site, that permits users to generate different kinds of graphs of citation networks by querying the Open Citation Corpus for a particular article, and either display the network of papers citing that article (input citations), papers cited by that article (output citations), or both.
The JISC Open Citations Project website at http://opencitations.net exists for several purposes: To hold introductory information about the JISC Open Citations Project. To hold contact information for the project team.
The input PubMed Central Open Access subset XML reference data, our starting corpus, were transformed into Open Citations RDF in multiple stages: The original XML was first transformed into an intermediate form using XSLT.
As previously described, the PubMed Central Open Access subset of journal articles yielded 6,529,815 independent bibliographic records of both citing and cited entities, while our use of the PubMed Entrez API provided a further 2,304,143 bibliographic records for the same cited entities. Before converting these references into RDF to create the Open Citations Corpust, we attempted to remove errors in the data.
To illustrate three kinds of problems in obtaining correct author lists for Open Citation data from articles in the PubMed Central Open Access subset (OASS), I take three examples, the first of which is the result of a publication policy, the second due to mis-handling of an authorship attribution at the time of publication, and the third exemplifing errors introduced when handling non-English personal names.
The Open Citations Project has aimed to liberate bibliographic references from biomedical research literature as Open Linked Data, using as its starting corpus the Open Access Subset (OASS) of articles within PubMed Central. The greatest problem faced during this project, naively unanticipated before we started, was the extend of incompleteness, noise and errors of various sorts within the reference information extracted from the OASS articles.