Hot on the heels of my announcement on Monday that Nature Publishing Group has agreed to open its articles’ reference lists, I am delighted to announce that Science Magazine , the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s premier global science weekly, together with the other AAAS journals Science Signalling and Science Translational Medicine , will also open their articles’ reference lists, and contribute

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.

Many people will be familiar with Tim Berners-Lee’s five stars of linked data, categorising the publication of data on the web in levels of increasing usefulness.

In the previous post, I outlined reasons why researchers don’t publish data, presented as evidence to the Royal Society’s Policy Study “Science as a Public Enterprise” Call for Evidence.

Alistair Miles, of SKOS fame, who formerly worked in our research group, spent yesterday afternoon catching up with us, and has written a nice blog post on the MalariaGEN Informatics Blog describing our current activities, including our work on the Open Citations Corpus, and how they might intersect with the data management activities of the MalariaGEN, the Malaria Genome Epidemiology Network for which he now works.

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.

**Executive summary ** *Introduction * To general readers of this blog, this post will appear different from normal posts. Rather than being about a particular topic, it pulls together a summary of the work undertaken over the past year within the Open Citations Project supported by the JISC, and is primarily intended to assist JISC evaluation of the project and its outputs.