(17 January 2018) The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) encourages scholarly publishers to make the references found in their journals and books openly available through Crossref. With a few exceptions (most notably the American Chemical Society, Elsevier, IEEE, and Wolters Kluwer Health), almost all large publishers support the initiative. So far, this support has resulted in approximately half of all references deposited in Crossref being openly available, yielding about half a billion open references.
I4OC has attracted widespread attention. The initiative is of particular importance for the scientometric community. Thanks to I4OC, Crossref has the potential to become an openly available source of citation data covering a large share of all scholarly literature. I4OC has been endorsed by CWTS and the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Last month, an open letter from the scientometric community was published calling for publishers to open their references. This letter has already been signed by nearly 300 individuals.
CWTS has the full article by Nees Jan van Eck, Ludo Waltman, Vincent Larivière, Cassidy Sugimoto.
