In 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.
Outside of the top largest contributors, many more scientific publishing organisations are also supporting I4OC, notably the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) – publishers of Science magazine and others – the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and three further society publishers: the American Society for Cell Biology, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Electrochemical Society. They follow the lead already shown, for example, by the American Geophysical Union, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Royal Society. Other publishers who have moved to release reference data since the launch of I4OC are AOSIS, Intech, IOS Press, MDPI and World Scientific Publishing.
We are also thrilled to announce that more organizations are joining our list of stakeholders endorsing the initiative, including the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University (CWTS), CORE, Jisc, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and ScienceOpen.
With over 40 publishers now leading the way, we call on all 900+ remaining publishers, particularly the smaller publishers who deposit reference data at Crossref, to join this initiative and make their reference data open.
Making the data publicly available is simple. To release your reference data, please send a request to support@crossref.org.
We’ll report back in three months with an update on how many additional publishers have switched their reference data to open.
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Emily Packer
eLife
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+441223855373
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eLife is a unique collaboration between the funders and practitioners of research to improve the way important research is selected, presented and shared. eLife publishes outstanding works across the life sciences and biomedicine — from basic biological research to applied, translational, and clinical studies. All papers are selected by active scientists in the research community. Decisions and responses are agreed by the reviewers and consolidated by the Reviewing Editor into a single, clear set of instructions for authors, removing the need for laborious cycles of revision and allowing authors to publish their findings quickly. eLife is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust. Learn more at elifesciences.org.
