Themes

Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)

What is this about?

This collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other concerned parties aims to promote availability of scholarly citation data. Making these data open to everyone in a machine-readable format and without the need to go to the source would maximise their use and provide benefits for all stakeholders in research, especially independent researchers.^[1]

Why is this important?

Citations are indispensable part of scholarly publications because they direct readers to sources, acknowledge other works in bibliographic references, help researchers avoid misconduct such as plagiarism, and enable the evaluation of publications.^[2]^[3]

Usually citation data are not freely accessible or machine-readable, which makes them unavailable to a great number of independent scholars.^[2]^[4] To enhance their use, they should be available to everyone. This is the aim of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), which promotes open and unrestricted access to citation data. These data should be structured (expressed in a machine-readable format), separable (available without the need to go to the source, such as articles or books), and open (freely accessible and reusable without restrictions).^[2]^[3] Achieving this aim would be beneficial to independent researchers, publishers, funding agencies, academic institutions and the public in general.^[2]

For whom is this important?

ResearchersPublishersResearch institutionsLibrariansFunding agenciesComputer scientists

What are the best practices?

The Initiative has asked scholarly publishers, who were already depositing the reference lists of their publications at Crossref, to make them open and available to everyone. Before this Initiative, only 1% of all references deposited at Crossref were open. As of August 2021, the percentage of publications with open references has grown from 1% to 88% out of 56.1 million articles with references submitted to Crossref.^[2]

Among significant publishers there are BMJ, Cambridge University Press, MIT Press, Oxford University Press, The Royal Society of Chemistry, SAGE Publications, and Wiley.^[2] You can see the full list here.

Andrijana Perković Paloš contributed to this theme. Latest contribution was Sep 13, 2021

Other information

Virtues & Values

Good Practices & Misconduct

↑ Initiative for Open Citations. [cited 2021 Sept 13]. Available from: https://i4oc.org/.
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 ^2.2 ^2.3 ^2.4 ^2.5 Initiative for Open Citations. [cited 2021 Sept 13]. Available from: https://i4oc.org/.
↑ ^3.0 ^3.1 Boyes B. What is the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), and why is it important? 2018 Sept 25. [cited 2021 Sept 13]. Real KM Evidence based. Practical results. Available from: https://realkm.com/2018/09/25/what-is-the-initiative-for-open-citations-i4oc-and-why-is-it-important/.
↑ Peroni S, Shotton D. OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship. Quantitative Science Studies. 2020;1(1):428-444.

[1] Initiative for Open Citations. [cited 2021 Sept 13]. Available from: https://i4oc.org/.

[:0-2] 2.0 ^2.1 ^2.2 ^2.3 ^2.4 ^2.5 Initiative for Open Citations. [cited 2021 Sept 13]. Available from: https://i4oc.org/.

[:1-3] 3.0 ^3.1 Boyes B. What is the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), and why is it important? 2018 Sept 25. [cited 2021 Sept 13]. Real KM Evidence based. Practical results. Available from: https://realkm.com/2018/09/25/what-is-the-initiative-for-open-citations-i4oc-and-why-is-it-important/.

[4] Peroni S, Shotton D. OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship. Quantitative Science Studies. 2020;1(1):428-444.

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