Rescuing Knowledge For Researchers

The Initiative For Open Citations

Ankana Bhadra

Library Professional Trainee

IIT Gandhinagar

Outline

• What is this initiative about?
• The idea of Open Citation
• Behind the screen
• Who paved the way?
• Stakeholders
• Key benefits
• Beneficiaries
• List of member publishers
• Lessons to be learned

“Citations are the foundation for how we know what we know”

-Dario Taraborelli, Head of Research at the Wikimedia Foundation

What is this initiative about?

The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is a project launched publicly in April 2017. It is a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data.

Citations

Scientific & Cultural Knowledge

How we know facts

Attribute and credit scientific contributions

Evaluation of research

Definition & Goal

Open citations are citations that are freely available and machine-readable, allowing them to be accessed, analyzed, and reused by anyone without legal, technical, or financial barriers.

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Open citation data typically includes metadata about the citing document (e.g., title, author, publisher, date) and the cited document (e.g., title, author, publication, page number).

Goal of the initiative:

• to increase the availability, discoverability, and use of citation data to advance scholarship and knowledge discovery
• to facilitate more efficient and effective research, reproducibility, and transparency in scholarly communication

• Structured

means that citation data must be expressed in one or more machine-readable formats

• Separable

means that citation data must be available without the need to access the source bibliographic entity (e.g. the article or book) in which the citation is defined

• Open

means that citation data must be freely accessible and reusable without restrictions, for example by publication under the CC0 1.0 Universal waiver/license

The idea of Open Citation*

*Silvio Peroni, Co-Director of OpenCitations

Importance

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• Reproducibility: Open citation data makes it easier for researchers to verify and reproduce studies, as they can see the sources that were used to build on prior research.
• Transparency: Open citation data allows for greater transparency in research, as it enables scholars to trace the lineage of ideas and to see how studies have built upon each other over time.
• Innovation: Open citation data promotes innovation by enabling new forms of analysis and research. For example, researchers can use citation data to identify emerging trends or to explore new research directions.
• Efficiency: Open citation data can save researchers time and effort, as they do not need to spend resources collecting and organizing citation data.
• Accessibility: Open citation data can make scholarly literature more accessible to a wider audience, as it can be used to create tools and services that make it easier for non-experts to explore and understand scholarly works.

Behind the screen

• Crossref (through the Crossref REST API)

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• OpenCitations Corpus (a database that harvests citation data from Crossref and other sources)

• http://api.crossref.org/members?filter=has-public-references:true&rows=1000
• http://api.crossref.org/members?filter=has-public-references:true&rows=1000&query=hindawi

Who paved the way?

Stakeholders

• Funders
• Scholarly platforms
• Open data organizations
• Publishers

Key benefits that arise from a fully open citation dataset

• The establishment of a global public web of linked scholarly citation data (both subscription access and open access). This will particularly benefit individuals who are not members of academic institutions with subscriptions to commercial citation databases.

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• The ability to build new services

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• The creation of a public citation graph

Current timeline

As of August 2022, the fraction of publications with open references has grown from 1% to 100% out of 61 million articles with references deposited with Crossref.

• Improved reproducibility: Open citations make it easier to reproduce and verify research by providing a clear record of the sources that were used.
• Greater transparency: Open citations enable researchers to trace the lineage of ideas and to see how studies have built upon each other over time, promoting greater transparency in research.
• More efficient research: Open citations can save researchers time and effort, as they do not need to spend resources collecting and organizing citation data.
• Increased discoverability: Open citations make it easier for researchers to discover new research areas and to identify important trends by providing a rich, machine-readable source of information on the relationships between different scholarly works.

For researchers

For publishers

• Greater impact: Open citations can increase the impact of publications by making them more discoverable and by facilitating greater collaboration and reuse of scholarly works.
• Improved reputation: Publishers that adopt open citation practices can demonstrate their commitment to transparency, collaboration, and innovation in scholarly communication, which can enhance their reputation and credibility.
• Enhanced editorial process: Open citations can facilitate the editorial process by enabling editors to identify important trends and relationships between different scholarly works.

For the wider scholarly community

• Improved collaboration: Open citations promote greater collaboration between researchers and publishers by facilitating the sharing and reuse of citation data.
• Greater innovation: Open citations enable new forms of analysis and research, which can lead to new discoveries and innovations in scholarship.
• More accessible research: Open citations can make scholarly literature more accessible to a wider audience, as it can be used to create tools and services that make it easier for non-experts to explore and understand scholarly works.

Beneficiaries

• Authors will have consistent, machine-readable access to references for all the publishers
• Researchers will be able to use this resource to study the dissemination of scholarly knowledge
• Funders will be able to rely on a public resource
• Publishers will benefit from the increased discoverability of publications
• The public will be able to use this data to trace knowledge or reuse it in open knowledge repositories

List of member publishers

Lessons to be learned

• A single, measurable goal
• Easy and doesn’t cost anything
• Can’t be achieved alone unless data is pooled
• Publishers also benefit

• Promote the initiative among researchers and publishers

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• Just a mail away  support@crossref.org

What can libraries do?

It is up to publishers and researchers to promote and develop open citation initiatives to rescue and set the scholarly knowledge free.

• Resistance from publishers
• Technical barriers
• Privacy concerns
• Lack of awareness
• Funding constraints

Challenges and future directions

References

1. Initiative for Open Citations https://i4oc.org/
2. Initiative for Open Citations. (2022). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Initiative_for_Open_Citations&oldid=1074188413
3. Now free: Citation data from 14 million papers, and more might come. (n.d.). Retrieved May 24, 2022, from https://www.science.org/content/article/now-free-citation-data-14-million-papers-and-more-might-come
4. Peroni, S., Dutton, A., Gray, T., & Shotton, D. (2015). Setting our bibliographic references free: Towards open citation data. Journal of Documentation, 71(2), 253–277. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-12-2013-0166
5. Heibi, I., Peroni, S., & Shotton, D. (2019). Software review: COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. Scientometrics, 121(2), 1213–1228. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03217-6
6. Langham-Putrow, A., Bakker, C., & Riegelman, A. (2021). Is the open access citation advantage real? A systematic review of the citation of open access and subscription-based articles. PLOS ONE, 16(6), e0253129. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253129