Initiative for Open Citations

Last updated
Initiative for Open Citations
AbbreviationI4OC
FormationApril 6, 2017;6 years ago (2017-04-06)
Legal statusActive
PurposeUnrestricted availability of scholarly citation data
Website i4oc.org

The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is a project launched publicly in April 2017, [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] that describes itself as: [7] [8] "a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data and to make these data available." It is intended to facilitate improved citation analysis.

Contents

Methodology

The citations are stored in Crossref and are made available through the Crossref REST API. They are also available from the OpenCitations Corpus, a database that harvests citation data from Crossref and other sources. [9] The data are considered by those involved in the Initiative to be in the public domain, and so a CC0 licence is used. [5] The stated benefits of this approach are: 1. discoverability of published content; 2. the building of new services, and 3. creation of a public citation graph to explore connections between knowledge fields. [9] The Royal Society of Chemistry earmarked the I4OC as a feature of excellence in publishing, [10] and IOP Publishing participates to implement their commitment to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. [11]

Launch

The initiative was established in response to a paper on citations in Wikidata, Citations needed for the sum of all human knowledge: Wikidata as the missing link between scholarly publishing and linked open data , given by Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation, at the eighth Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, in September 2016. [5] At that time, only 1% of papers in Crossref had citations metadata that were freely available. By the time of the public launch, on 6 April 2017, that had risen to 40% as a result of setting up the initiative. [6]

The founding partners were: [12]

At the time of launch, 64 organisations, including the Wellcome Trust, the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, [5] had endorsed the project and as of May, 2017, Sloan Foundation confirmed it would be providing funding. [13] 29 of these organisations were publishers who had agreed to share their citation metadata openly. [2] These include Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. [6] On 11 July 2017, the Initiative announced that a further sixteen publishers had signed up. [14] On 8 August 2017, the Initiative released on open letter to stakeholders. [15] The same month, the British Library became a member organisation. [16]

Growth

Elsevier, who contribute 30% of the citation metadata in Crossref, [6] did not initially join the initiative. In April 2017, Elsevier's vice-president of corporate relations, Tom Reller, said: [1]

We are aware of the initiative but want to learn more before making a decision on whether to participate.

In January 2019, the Editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Informetrics resigned and launched the new journal Quantitative Science Studies, citing Elsevier's lack of support for the I4OC as one of the main reasons for the move. [17] Elsevier claimed in response that they could not release their data for free due to loss of licensing revenue from their proprietary Scopus citation services. [18] Elsevier finally joined the initiative in January 2021 after the data was already available with an Open Data Commons license in Microsoft Academic. [19]

In August 2022, the number of articles whose reference lists were free to access and reuse exceeded 60 million, out of 134 million articles indexed by Crossref. [20]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Archives Initiative</span>

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives to share catalogue information (metadata). The group got together in the late late 1990s and was active for around twenty years. OAI coordinated in particular three specification activities: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE and ResourceSync. All along the group worked towards building a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content to allow people harvest metadata. Such sets of metadata are since then harvested to provide "value-added services", often by combining different data sets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elsevier</span> Dutch publishing and analytics company

Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, Trends, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics, and assessment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital object identifier</span> ISO standard unique string identifier for a digital object

A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; they also fit within the URI system. They are widely used to identify academic, professional, and government information, such as journal articles, research reports, data sets, and official publications. DOIs have also been used to identify other types of information resources, such as commercial videos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliometrics</span> Statistical analysis of written publications

Bibliometrics is the use of statistical methods to analyse books, articles and other publications, especially in scientific contents. Bibliometric methods are frequently used in the field of library and information science. Bibliometrics is closely associated with scientometrics, the analysis of scientific metrics and indicators, to the point that both fields largely overlap.

Scientometrics is the field of study which concerns itself with measuring and analysing scholarly literature. Scientometrics is a sub-field of informetrics. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that over-reliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Scholar</span> Academic search service by Google

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

ScienceDirect is a website that provides access to a large bibliographic database of scientific and medical publications of the Dutch publisher Elsevier. It hosts over 18 million pieces of content from more than 4,000 academic journals and 30,000 e-books of this publisher. The access to the full-text requires subscription, while the bibliographic metadata is free to read. ScienceDirect is operated by Elsevier. It was launched in March 1997.

An article or piece is a written work published in a print or electronic medium. It may be for the purpose of propagating news, research results, academic analysis, or debate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crossref</span> Organization

Crossref is an official digital object identifier (DOI) Registration Agency of the International DOI Foundation. It is run by the Publishers International Linking Association Inc. (PILA) and was launched in early 2000 as a cooperative effort among publishers to enable persistent cross-publisher citation linking in online academic journals. In August 2022, Crossref lists that index more than 60 million journal studies were made free to view and reuse, publicly challenging other publishers to add their reference data to the index.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BASE (search engine)</span> Academic search engine

BASE is a multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on free and open-source software such as Apache Solr and VuFind. It harvests OAI metadata from institutional repositories and other academic digital libraries that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and then normalizes and indexes the data for searching. In addition to OAI metadata, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ORCID</span> Code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors

The ORCID is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic output.

OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization which creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data, code, and governance. OurResearch is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Arcadia Fund.

Data publishing is the act of releasing research data in published form for use by others. It is a practice consisting in preparing certain data or data set(s) for public use thus to make them available to everyone to use as they wish. This practice is an integral part of the open science movement. There is a large and multidisciplinary consensus on the benefits resulting from this practice.

Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, without regard to copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. It does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. Sci-Hub has been estimated to contain 95% of all scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers. Sci-Hub reported on 15 July 2022 that its collection comprises 88,343,822 files.

SciCrunch is a collaboratively edited knowledge base about scientific resources. It is a community portal for researchers and a content management system for data and databases. It is intended to provide a common source of data to the research community and the data about Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs), which can be used in scientific publications. After starting as a pilot of two journals in 2014, by 2022 over 1,000 journals have been using them and over half a million RRIDs have been quoted in the scientific literature. In some respect, it is for science and scholarly publishing, similar to what Wikidata is for Wikimedia Foundation projects. Hosted by the University of California, San Diego, SciCrunch was also designed to help communities of researchers create their own portals to provide access to resources, databases and tools of relevance to their research areas

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Academic</span> Online bibliographic database

Microsoft Academic was a free internet-based academic search engines for academic publications and literature, developed by Microsoft Research, shut down in 2022. At the same time, OpenAlex launched and claimed to be a successor to Microsoft Academic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Peters (publisher)</span> Biographies

Paul Harvey Peters is the non-Executive Board Chair of online conference software provider ExOrdo and from 2015-2021 was the Chief Executive Officer of the Open Access publisher Hindawi. He is past Chair of the Board of Crossref and was President of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) from 2013 to 2019. Peters is known for his work as an advocate for Open Access, open infrastructure for Open Science, and research integrity in the published literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenCitations</span>

OpenCitations is a project aiming to publish open bibliographic citation information in RDF. It produces the "OpenCitations Corpus" citation database in the process.

The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SciPost</span> Nonprofit open-access publisher

SciPost is a non-profit foundation dedicated to developing, implementing and maintaining innovative forms of electronic scientific communication and publishing. It is notable for operating the scipost.org open-access scientific publishing portal.

References

  1. 1 2 Schiermeier, Quirin (6 April 2017). "Initiative aims to break science's citation paywall". Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21800. ISSN   1476-4687. S2CID   57712682.
  2. 1 2 Treanor, Kim (6 April 2017). "New Large-Scale Initiative Aims To Increase Open Access To Scholarly Research". Intellectual Property Watch . Retrieved 6 April 2017.
  3. ↑ Taraborelli, Dario; Dugan, Jonathan (6 April 2017). "How we know what we know: The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) helps unlock millions of connections between scholarly research". Wikimedia Blog. Wikimedia Foundation . Retrieved 6 April 2017.
  4. ↑ "Global Coalition Pushes for Unrestricted Sharing of Scholarly Citation Data". Creative Commons. 6 April 2017. Retrieved 6 April 2017.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Chawla, Dalmeet Singh (6 April 2017). "Now free: citation data from 14 million papers, and more might come". Science . doi: 10.1126/science.aal1012 .
  6. 1 2 3 4 Molteni, Megan (6 April 2017). "The Initiative for Open Citations Is Tearing Down Science's Citation Paywall, One Link At A Time". Wired . Retrieved 8 April 2017.
  7. ↑ "I4OC: Initiative for Open Citations". Initiative for Open Citations. 6 April 2017. Retrieved 6 April 2017.
  8. ↑ "Opening Up Research Citations: A Q&A with Dario Taraborelli | Wiley". hub.wiley.com. Retrieved 2017-08-09.
  9. 1 2 "FAQ". Initiative for Open Citations. Retrieved 6 April 2017.
  10. ↑ "Re-thinking excellence in research - RSC signs DORA". Royal Society of Chemistry. June 2020. Retrieved 12 June 2021.
  11. ↑ "IOP Publishing signs DORA affirming its commitment to raising standards in research evaluation | Mirage News". www.miragenews.com. Mirage News. 2020-10-19. Retrieved 12 June 2021.
  12. ↑ "Press". Initiative for Open Citations. 6 April 2017. Retrieved 6 April 2017.
  13. ↑ Shotton, David (2017-05-15). "The Sloan Foundation funds OpenCitations". OpenCitations. Retrieved 2017-05-21.
  14. ↑ "Availability of open reference data nears 50% as major societies and influential publishers endorse the Initiative for Open Citations". Initiative for Open Citations. Retrieved 11 July 2017.
  15. ↑ I4OC. "I4OC: Initiative for Open Citations - Press". i4oc.org. Retrieved 2017-08-08.
  16. ↑ "I4OC: The British Library and open data - Science blog". British Library . Retrieved 30 August 2017.
  17. ↑ "Editorial board of Journal of Informetrics resigns and launches new journal". CWTS News. 14 January 2019. Retrieved 15 March 2019.
  18. ↑ Reller, Tom (15 January 2019). "About the resignation of the Journal of Informetrics Editorial Board". Elsevier Connect. Retrieved 15 March 2019.
  19. ↑ Waltman, Ludo (22 December 2020). "Q&A about Elsevier's decision to open its citations". Leiden Madtrics. Universiteit Leiden . Retrieved 11 June 2021.
  20. ↑ Singh Chawla, Dalmeet (2022-09-13). "Five-year campaign breaks science's citation paywall". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-02926-y. ISSN   0028-0836. PMID   36100743. S2CID   252220223.
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