We congratulate and thank Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, for endorsing the DORA Declaration on Research Assessment (https://sfdora.org/), thereby joining the hundreds of other publishers and scientific organizations which have endorsed DORA over the previous eight years, and also for making a commitment to open the references from all its journal articles submitted to Crossref. The text of Elsevier’s endorsement, dated 16th December 2020, is to be found at https://www.elsevier.com/connect/advancing-responsible-research-assessment, and includes the statement:
“We will make reference lists for all articles published in Elsevier journals openly available via Crossref so they can be available for reuse. This means other important initiatives like I4OC can draw on this metadata.”
Particular thanks are due to Kumsal Bayazit, Elsevier’s CEO, and to Andrew Plume, head of Elsevier’s International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR), for spearheading this change in stance on the part of Elsevier, which until this week has been alone among the major scholarly publishers in keeping its reference lists at Crossref closed, for which it has attracted much criticism from the academic community.
This change of heart on the part of Elsevier now means that by next spring, after Crossref has had a chance to implement this change in status over the large corpus of Elsevier journal metadata, the reference lists of articles in the vast majority of the world’s academic journals will be open, enabling such metadata to be used to enhance publication discovery and enable transparent research assessment. The I4OC web site and COCI, OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, will reflect this change once it has happened.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and the University of Chicago Press now stand alone as the only significant scholarly publishers who choose not to make their publication reference lists open.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
davidshotton (December 20, 2020). Elsevier endorses DORA and opens its journal article reference lists. OpenCitations blog. Retrieved October 15, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/sje9
This is great news!
> The I4OC web site and COCI, OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, will reflect this change once it has happened.
Crossref seems to have made this change already. At least, that’s what it shows in its Participation Report page for Elsevier (https://www.crossref.org/members/prep/78). I have also checked some Elsevier-published articles using Crossref’s API, and references are there. See for example https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.07.015.
However, COCI doesn’t seem to have been updated. OpenCitations API for the same example above shows zero references: https://opencitations.net/index/api/v1/references/10.1016/J.JECP.2018.07.015
I understand this change isn’t automatic, but rather it should wait until the next COCI release (last update seems to have been on 7 Dec 2020). When will the next update occur?
Thanks!
Ingesting and processing the data dumps from Crossref takes a long time, since Crossref does not supply just new metadata, only dumps of their entire open metadata holdings. We are aware of the interest in the next release of COCI that will include the recently opened Elsevier references, and are working to have this available in the near future.
Thanks, David!