Citations are now centre stage As a result of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), launched on April 6 last year, almost all the major scholarly publishers now open the reference lists they submit to Crossref, resulting in more than half a billion references being openly available via the Crossref API.

Some folk are confused, but OpenCitations and the Initiative for Open Citations, despite the similarity of their names, are two distinct organizations.

Good news!  Today, on January 16th 2018, Oxford University Press (OUP) announced its participation in the Initiative for Open Citations, and requested Crossref to turn on reference sharing for all OUP deposited references from more than half a million publications.  Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world, publishing in 70 languages … Continue reading Oxford University Press opens its references!

On 9th January 2018, I published a World View article in Nature entitled Funders should mandate open citations [1], in which I argue that access to open references from scholarly publications is so important that, when encouragements from organisations such as the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) to publishers to open their references fall on deaf ears, … Continue reading Funders should mandate open citations

Two significant barriers prevent comprehensive reference availability through Crossref. The first barrier First, two-thirds of Crossref’s publisher-members, in particular the smaller ones, do not submit references along with the other details of their publications. Many of these published works are of types (e.g. abstracts, editorials and news items) that lack any references.

Since 1st January 2018, Crossref has had a new reference distribution policy, described at https://www.crossref.org/reference-distribution/. There are three possible options for setting the reference distribution preference from which a publisher can choose, these being ‘Closed’, ‘Limited’ and ‘Open”. If the ‘Closed’ option is chosen, the references will only be used for the Crossref Cited-by service, … Continue reading The new Crossref

For completeness, this post, also based on analyses performed by Daniel Ecer of eLife (d.ecer@elifesciences.org) on data he downloaded from Crossref in September 2017 (Ecer, 2017), complements the two preceding posts, and details the openness of references from scholarly publishers other than Elsevier.

Yesterday (November 23rd 2017) I was working with Daniel Ecer of eLife (d.ecer@elifesciences.org) to dig some hard facts out of the analyses he undertook on data he downloaded from Crossref in September 2017 (Ecer, 2017).

Yesterday (November 23rd 2017) I was working with Daniel Ecer of eLife (d.ecer@elifesciences.org) to dig some hard facts out of the analyses he undertook on data he downloaded from Crossref in September 2017 (Ecer, 2017).  In this, the first of two related posts, I report the results for all publishers.

The OpenCitations Enhancement Project funded by Sloan The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funds research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economics, including a number of key technology projects relating to scholarly communication, has agreed to fund The OpenCitations Enhancement Project, a new project to develop and enhance the OpenCitations Corpus.

OpenCitations makes available a SPARQL endpoint for querying the data included in the OpenCitations Corpus. While several queries are possible according to the model described in the website (and, with more details, in the official metadata document of the Corpus), we have received some requests by users of the service for exemplar queries.