The California Digital
Library (CDL) is proud to announce our formal endorsement for the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). CDL has
long supported free and reusable scholarly work, as well as organizations and
initiatives supporting citations in publication. With a growing database of
literature and research data citations, there is a need for an open global
network of citation data.
The Initiative for Open
Citations will work with Crossref and their Cited-by service to open up all
references indexed in Crossref. Many publishers
and stakeholders have opted in
to participate in opening up their citation data, and we hope that each year
this list will grow to encompass all fields of publication. Furthermore, we
are looking forward to seeing how research data citations will be a part of
this discussion.
CDL is a firm believer in
and advocate for data citations and persistent identifiers in scholarly work.
However, if research publications are cited and those citations are not
freely accessible and searchable- our goal is not accomplished. We are proud
to support the Initiative for Open Citations and invite you to get in touch
with any questions you may have about the need for open citations or ways to
be an advocate for this necessary change.
Below are some Frequently Asked Questions about the need,
ways to get involved, and misconceptions regarding citations. The answers are
provided by the Board and founders of the I4OC Initiative:
I am a scholarly
publisher not enrolled in the Cited-by service. How do I enable it?
If not already a
participant in Cited-by, a Crossref member can register for this service
free-of-charge. Having done so, there is nothing further the publisher needs
to do to ‘open’ its reference data, other than to give its consent to
Crossref, since participation in Cited-by alone does not automatically make
these references available via Crossref’s standard APIs.
I am a scholarly
publisher already depositing references to Crossref. How do I publicly
release them?
We encourage all publishers
to make their reference metadata publicly available. If you are already
submitting article metadata to Crossref as a participant in their Cited-by
service, opening them can be achieved in a matter of days. Publishers can
easily and freely achieve this:
- either
by contacting Crossref support directly by e-mail,
asking them to turn on reference distribution for all of the relevant
DOI prefixes;
- or
by themselves setting the <
reference_distribution_opt > metadata element to “ any ” for each DOI
deposit for which they want to make references openly available.
How do I access open
citation data?
Once made open, the
references for individual scholarly publications may be accessed immediately
through the Crossref REST API.
Open citations are also
available from the OpenCitations Corpus , a database created to house
scholarly citations, that is progressively and systematically harvested
citation data from Crossref and other sources. An advantage of accessing citation
data from the OpenCitations Corpus is that they are available in
standards-compliant machine-readable RDF format , and include information
about both incoming and outgoing citations of bibliographic resources
(published articles and books).
Does this initiative
cover future citations only or also historical data?
Both. All DOIs under a
prefix set for open reference distribution will have open references through
Crossref, for past, present, and future publications.
Past and present
publications that lack DOIs are not dealt with by Crossref, and gaining
access to their citation data will require separate initiatives by their
publishers or others to extract and openly publish those references.
Under what licensing
terms is citation data being made available?
Crossref exposes article
and reference metadata without a license, since it regards these as raw facts
that cannot be licensed.
The structured citation
metadata within the OpenCitations Corpus are published under a Creative
Commons CC0 public domain dedication, to make it explicitly clear that these
data are open.
My journal is open
access. Aren’t its articles’ citations automatically available?
No. Although Open Access
articles may be open and freely available to read on the publisher’s website,
their references are not separate, and are not necessarily structured or
accessible programmatically. Additionally, although their reference metadata
may be submitted to Crossref, Crossref historically set the default for
references to “closed,” with a manual opt-in being required for public
references. Many publisher members have not been aware that they could simply
instruct Crossref to make references open, and, as a neutral party, Crossref
has not promoted the public reference option. All publishers therefore
have to opt in to open distribution of references via Crossref.
Is there a programmatic
way to check whether a publisher’s or journal’s citation data is free to
reuse?
For Crossref metadata ,
their REST API reveals how many and which publishers have opened references.
Any system or tool (or a JSON viewer) can be pointed to this query: http://api.crossref.org/members?filter=has-public-references:true&rows=1000
to show the count and the list of publishers with “ public-references “: true
.
To query a specific
publisher’s status, use, for example:
http://api.crossref.org/members?filter=has-public-references:true&rows=1000&qu
ery=springer then find the tag for public-references. In some cases it will
be set to false.
Contact
You can contact the
founding group by e-mail at: info@i4oc.org
.
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