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Save the dates: OpenCitations October events 

With the numerous September events in which the OpenCitations’ directors have recently been involved behind us, it is now time to announce the participation of our director Silvio Peroni in two October events. 

On Wednesday 6th, Silvio will take part in the Beilstein OpenScience Symposium 2021 (October 5-7), giving a short presentation “Open Citations, an Open Infrastructure to Provide Access to Global Scholarly Bibliographic and Citation Data” during the Poster Flash Talk Presentation (17:10-18:00 CEST). The Beilstein OpenScience Symposium is an annual event that gathers leaders in the FAIR and Open Data movement, covering a wide range of research fields, including biomedical research, physics and social science, and exploring how open data practices are transforming sectors outside academia. The 2021 online edition will present a series of talks addressing the many ways that data transparency contributes to the research progress. Among them, the poster presentations involve short oral presentations on Wednesday, 6th October, to accompany the posters that will be displayed throughout the entire symposium. Poster abstracts are available in the Abstract Book that can be downloaded on Beilstein Symposium’s website: https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/symposia/open-science/program/ .

You can register for the event here: https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/symposia/open-science/registration/

The poster and slides from the presentation are available on Zenodo:

Peroni, S. (2021, October 6). Open Citations, an Open Infrastructure to Provide Access to Global Scholarly Bibliographic and Citation Data—Poster Flash Talk Session slides. Beilstein Open Science Symposium 2021, Virtual Event. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5553025

Peroni, S., Shotton, D. W., & Di Giambattista, C. (2021). Open Citations, an Open Infrastructure to Provide Access to Global Scholarly Bibliographic and Citation Data. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5553040

The second event is the annual European Computer Science Summit (ECSS), organized by Informatics Europe and involving academics, industry leaders, decision makers and others interested in Informatics/Computer Science research and education in Europe. ECSS 2021, “Informatics for a Sustainable Future” (Oct. 25-27), will be held as a hybrid event, involving both online as well as on-site sessions held in Madrid, at the Facultad de Ciencias de la Actividad Física y del Deporte (INEF), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid located at Calle de Martín Fierro, 7

During the last day of the meeting (Oct. 27), Silvio Peroni will be speaking at the “National Informatics Associations Workshop”, an annual workshop organised by Informatics Europe in collaboration with the National Informatics Associations in Europe. This year the workshop will address the themes Informatics in Interdisciplinary Curricula and Research Evaluation in Informatics, thus focusing on an important question: how to recognise, assess and credit research contributions specific to Informatics, such as conference publications and software artefacts. Elaborating on this, Silvio’s talk (to be delivered in person, rather than online!) is entitled “Open citations in Informatics” (9:00 CEST).  

For further information and registrations: https://www.informatics-europe.org/ecss/registration/how-to-register.html

We thank Beilstein Institute and Informatics Europe for involving OpenCitations in these international events, which provide opportunities to promote the OpenCitations infrastructure and services in stimulating environments.

We hope to see you there

The Initiative for Open Citations

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. The other I4OC founding organizations are Wikimedia Foundation, PLOS, eLife, DataCite, and the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University,

Until recently, the vast majority of citation data were not openly available, even though all major publishers freely share their article metadata through Crossref. Before I4OC started, only about 1% of the reference data deposited in Crossref were freely available. Today that figure has jumped to 40% [1].

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].

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].

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.  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, including the REST API 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 according to the OCC metadata model, and make them available in RDF under a Creative Commons public domain dedication as Linked Open 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

Footnotes

[1] 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] Full list of publishers now making their citation data open via Crossref.

[3] Full list of I4OC supporting stakeholder organizations.