University of Oxford

David M. Shotton

OpenCitations are pleased to announce the launch of the [Initiative for
Open Citations](https://i4oc.org) (I4OC) , a fresh momentum in the
scholarly publishing world to open up data on the citations that link
research publications.  [OpenCitations](http://opencitations.net/) are
proud to be a founder of I4OC, and we encourage those remaining
publishers whose journal article reference lists are still closed to
embrace this sea change in attitude towards open citation data. The
other I4OC founding organizations are [Wikimedia
Foundation](https://wikimediafoundation.org/),
[PLOS](https://www.plos.org/), [eLife](https://elifesciences.org/),
[DataCite](https://www.datacite.org/), and the [Centre for Culture and
Technology at Curtin
University](http://www.curtin.edu.au/research/ccat/),

Until recently, the vast majority of citation data were not openly
available, even though all major publishers freely share their article
metadata through [Crossref](https://www.crossref.org/). Before I4OC
started, only about 1% of the reference data deposited in Crossref were
freely available. Today that figure has jumped to 40%
[\[1\]](#fn1 "go to footnote 1"){#pt_fn1}.

## Publishers

In recent months, following earlier indications of willingness reported
in this blog, several publishers have made the decision to release these
metadata publicly, including the American Geophysical Union, Association
for Computing Machinery, BMJ, Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory Press, EMBO Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, SAGE
Publishing, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. These
publishers join other publishers who have been opening their references
through Crossref for some time. The full list of scholarly publishers
now opening their reference data via Crossef is given in
[\[2\]](#fn2 "go to footnote 2"){#pt_fn2}.

These decisions stem from discussions that have been taking place since
a call-to-action to open up citations was made by Dario Taraborelli of
the Wikimedia Foundation at the 2016 OASPA Conference on Open-Access
Publishing. The creation of I4OC was spearheaded by Jonathan Dugan,
Martin Fenner, Jan Gerlach, Catriona MacCallum, Daniel Mietchen, Cameron
Neylon, Mark Patterson, Michelle Paulson, Silvio Peroni, myself and
Dario Taraborelli. The purpose of I4OC is to coordinate these efforts
and to promote the creation of a comprehensive, freely-available corpus
of scholarly citation data.

## Benefits

Such a corpus will be valuable for new as well as existing services, and
will allow many more interested parties to explore, mine, and reuse the
data for new knowledge. The key benefits that arise from a fully open
citation dataset include:

1.  The establishment of a global public web of linked scholarly
    citation data to enhance the discoverability of published content,
    both subscription access and open access. This will particularly
    benefit individuals who are not members of academic institutions
    with subscriptions to commercial citation databases.
2.  The ability to build new services over the open citation data, for
    the benefit of publishers, researchers, funding agencies, academic
    institutions and the general public, as well as to enhancing
    existing services.
3.  The creation of a public citation graph to explore connections
    between knowledge fields, and to follow the evolution of ideas and
    scholarly disciplines.

## Stakeholders

The Internet Archive, Mozilla, the Wellcome Trust, and twenty eight
other projects and organizations have formally put their names behind
I4OC as stakeholders in support of openly accessible citations. The full
list of stakeholders is given in
[\[3\]](#fn3 "go to footnote 3"){#pt_fn3}.

## Endorsements

Dario Taraborelli, Head of Research at the Wikimedia Foundation, said:

"Citations are the foundation for how we know what we know. Today, tens
of millions of scholarly citations become available to the public with
no copyright restriction. We look forward to more organizations joining
this initiative to release, and build on these data."

Liz Ferguson, VP Publishing Development, Wiley, said:

"Wiley is delighted to support I4OC by opening our citation metadata via
Crossref. Collaborating with other publishers further contributes to
sustainable and standardized infrastructure that will benefit the
research community. We are particularly excited by the potential to
expose networks of research that would otherwise lie hidden or take
years to discover."

Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research at the Wellcome Trust, said:

"The open availability of citation data will help all funders better
evaluate the research they fund. The progress that I4OC has made is an
essential first step and we encourage all publishers to publicly share
this data."

Mark Patterson, Executive Director of eLife, said:

"It's fantastic to see the interest that's being shown by so many
publishers in making their reference list metadata publicly available.
We hope that this new momentum will encourage all publishers to follow
suit, and that new services and tools can be built around these open
data."

Catriona MacCallum Advocacy Director, PLOS, said:

"Creating an open database of citations will allow researchers to
perform independent analyses of how scientific ideas are communicated
through article citations, and a transparent way of tracking the
influence of particular articles. By opening up these metadata via
Crossref, publishers are providing a vital contribution to Open
Science."

## Future growth

Many other publishers have expressed interest in opening up their
reference data. They can do this very easily via Crossref, with a simple
email to support@crossref.org requesting they turn on reference
distribution for all their DOI prefixes. This is required even for
publishers of open access articles, since by default references
submitted to the Crossref Cited-By Linking service are closed, as
previously explained [here](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/465).
 I4OC will provide regular updates on the growth of the public citation
corpus, how the data are being used, additional stakeholders and
participating publishers as they join, and as new services are
developed.

## I4OC and OpenCitations

Through the efforts of I4OC, scholarly citation data will be
increasingly available to any interested party through all of
[Crossref's Metadata
Delivery Services](https://www.crossref.org/services/metadata-delivery),
including the [REST API](https://api.crossref.org/) and bulk metadata
dumps. From this open source, OpenCitations will progressively import
the citation data into the OpenCitations Corpus, describe them using the
[SPAR Ontologies](http://www.sparontologies.net) according to the OCC
metadata model, and make them available in RDF under a Creative Commons
public domain dedication as [Linked Open
Data](https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data).  Potential users
should be aware that is will take some considerable time before all the
new citation data now available via the Crossref API are ingested into
the OpenCitations Corpus.

## I4OC links

- I4OC Homepage: <https://i4oc.org>
- Twitter: <https://twitter.com/i4oc_org>
- Media contact: <info@i4oc.org>

## Footnotes

[\[1\]](#pt_fn1 "back to the content"){#fn1} 40% is the percentage of
publications with open references out of the total number of
publications with reference metadata deposited with Crossref. As of
March 2017, nearly 35 million articles with references are deposited
with Crossref.

[\[2\]](#pt_fn2 "back to the content"){#fn2} Full list of publishers now
making their citation data open via Crossref.

- [American Geophysical Union](https://publications.agu.org/)
- [Association for Computing Machinery](https://www.acm.org/)
- [BMJ](http://www.bmj.com/)
- [Cambridge University Press](http://www.cambridge.org/)
- [Co-Action Publishing](http://taylorandfrancis.com/co-action-message)
- [Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press](http://www.cshlpress.com/)
- [Copernicus GmbH](http://www.copernicus.org/)
- [eLife](https://elifesciences.org/)
- [EMBO Press](http://embopress.org/)
- [Faculty of 1000, Ltd.](http://f1000.com/)
- [Frontiers Media SA](http://www.frontiersin.org/)
- [Geological Society of London](https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/)
- [Hamad bin Khalifa University Press (HBKU
  Press)](http://www.hbkupress.com/)
- [Hindawi](https://www.hindawi.com/)
- [International Union of Crystallography](https://www.iucr.org/)
- [Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information](https://www.zpid.de/)
- [MIT Press](https://mitpress.mit.edu/)
- [PeerJ](https://peerj.com/)
- [Pensoft Publishers](http://pensoft.net/)
- [Portland Press](http://www.portlandpresspublishing.com/)
- [Public Library of Science](https://www.plos.org/)
- [Royal Society of Chemistry](http://www.rsc.org/)
- [SAGE Publishing](https://www.sagepub.com/)
- [Springer Nature](http://www.springernature.com/us/)
- [Taylor & Francis Group](http://taylorandfrancis.com/)
- [The Rockefeller University Press](http://rupress.org/)
- [The Royal Society](https://royalsociety.org/)
- [Ubiquity Press, Ltd.](http://www.ubiquitypress.com/)
- [Wiley](http://www.wiley.com/)

[\[3\]](#pt_fn3 "back to the content"){#fn3} Full list of I4OC
supporting stakeholder organizations.

- [Alfred P. Sloan Foundation](https://sloan.org/)
- [Altmetric](https://www.altmetric.com/)
- [Association of Research Libraries](http://www.arl.org/)
- [Authorea](https://www.authorea.com/)
- [Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation](http://www.gatesfoundation.org)
- [California Digital Library](http://www.cdlib.org/)
- [Center for Open Science](https://cos.io/)
- [Collaborative Knowledge Foundation](https://coko.foundation/)
- [Confederation of Open Access
  Repositories](https://www.coar-repositories.org/)
- [ContentMine](http://contentmine.org/)
- [Data Carpentry](http://www.datacarpentry.org/)
- [Dataverse](https://dataverse.org/)
- [dblp: computer science bibliography](http://dblp.uni-trier.de/)
- [Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of
  Bologna](http://www.cse.unibo.it)
- [Dryad](http://datadryad.org/)
- [Figshare](https://figshare.com/)
- [Hypothes.is](https://hypothes.is/)
- [ImpactStory](https://impactstory.org/)
- [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/)
- [Knowledge Lab](http://www.knowledgelab.org/)
- [Max Planck Digital Library](https://www.mpdl.mpg.de/en/)
- [Mozilla](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/)
- [Open Knowledge International](https://okfn.org/)
- [OpenAIRE](https://www.openaire.eu/)
- [Overleaf](https://www.overleaf.com/)
- [Project Jupyter](http://jupyter.org/)
- [rOpenSci](https://ropensci.org/)
- [Science Sandbox](https://sciencesandbox.org/)
- [Wellcome Trust](https://wellcome.ac.uk/)
- [Wiki Education Foundation](https://wikiedu.org/)
- [Wikimedia Deutschland](https://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Hauptseite)
- [Wikimedia UK](https://wikimedia.org.uk/)
- [Zotero](https://www.zotero.org/)


OpenCitations are pleased to announce the launch of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) , a fresh momentum in the scholarly publishing world to open up data on the citations that link research publications.  OpenCitations are proud to be a founder of I4OC, and we encourage those remaining publishers whose journal article reference lists are still closed to embrace this sea change in attitude towards open citation data.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

The Initiative for Open Citations