Category Archives: oa.i4oc

Citation data are now open, but that’s far from enough

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“The opening up of citation data is welcome. It means greater transparency and accountability for research studies designed to inform academics, funders and governments in their decisions about areas of research they should focus energy and money on.

But more is needed. Not all publishers index papers on Crossref, and not all indexed papers have citation data associated with them. One study published in July found that about one-third of papers indexed in 2021 are lacking such data (N. J. van Eck and L. Waltman. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/smxe5; 2022). Some of these articles — particularly editorials, letters, corrections and book reviews — might not have any references, but this by no means applies to all of them. Uploading citation data should not be seen as optional….”

OpenCitations: an independent infrastructure organization for open citation data | Zenodo

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“OpenCitations is an independent not-for-profit infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data by the use of Semantic Web (Linked Data) technologies. It is also engaged in advocacy for open citations, particularly in its role as a key founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC).

In this webinar, Silvio Peroni (Department of Classic Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna), who together with David Shotton (Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford) are the Directors of OpenCitations, will explain the data sets, tools, services, and activities of this infrastructure dedicated to the publication of open citation data as Linked Open Data using Semantic Web technologies.

The session is organised by the Evaluation and Metrics special interest group from the European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL).

Although the webinar is open also to non EAHIL members, we suggest having a look at the association website, and consider joining to be a part of a network for European health information professionals and librarians!”

Open Citations Registration, Wed 2 Feb 2022 at 11:30 | Eventbrite

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“OpenCitations is an independent not-for-profit infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data by the use of Semantic Web (Linked Data) technologies. It is also engaged in advocacy for open citations, particularly in its role as a key founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC).

In this webinar, Silvio Peroni (Department of Classic Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna), who together with David Shotton (Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford) are the Directors of OpenCitations, will explain the data sets, tools, services, and activities of this infrastructure dedicated to the publication of open citation data as Linked Open Data using Semantic Web technologies….”

Coverage of open citation data approaches parity with Web of Science and Scopus | OpenCitations blog

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“The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is an advocacy group that has been working since 2017 to achieve this precise goal, and it has already managed to convince a large number publishers (over two thousand) to open the references they deposit in CrossRef. In the first half of 2021, Elsevier, the American Chemical Society, and Wolters Kluwer joined this group, so that today all the major scholarly publishers now support I4OC and have open references at Crossref, with the exception of IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Thanks to the efforts of I4OC and the collaboration of publishers, 88% of the publications for which publishers have deposited references in CrossRef are now open. This has allowed organizations such as OpenCitations (one of the founding members of I4OC) to create a non-proprietary citation index using these data, namely COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. Other open citation indexes such as the NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC) and Refcat have also been recently released.

How do such open citation indexes compare to long-established indexes? In 2019, I set out with colleagues to analyze the coverage of citations contained within the most widely used academic bibliographic data sources (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar) to a selected corpus of 2,515 highly-cited English-language documents published in 2006 from 252 subject categories, and to compare this to the coverage provided by some of the more recent data sources (Microsoft Academic, Dimensions, and COCI). At that time, COCI was the smallest of the six indexes, containing only 28% of all citations. For comparison, Web of Science contained 52%, and Scopus contained 57%. …”

Coverage of open citation data approaches parity with Web of Science and Scopus | OpenCitations blog

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“The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is an advocacy group that has been working since 2017 to achieve this precise goal, and it has already managed to convince a large number publishers (over two thousand) to open the references they deposit in CrossRef. In the first half of 2021, Elsevier, the American Chemical Society, and Wolters Kluwer joined this group, so that today all the major scholarly publishers now support I4OC and have open references at Crossref, with the exception of IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Thanks to the efforts of I4OC and the collaboration of publishers, 88% of the publications for which publishers have deposited references in CrossRef are now open. This has allowed organizations such as OpenCitations (one of the founding members of I4OC) to create a non-proprietary citation index using these data, namely COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. Other open citation indexes such as the NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC) and Refcat have also been recently released.

How do such open citation indexes compare to long-established indexes? In 2019, I set out with colleagues to analyze the coverage of citations contained within the most widely used academic bibliographic data sources (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar) to a selected corpus of 2,515 highly-cited English-language documents published in 2006 from 252 subject categories, and to compare this to the coverage provided by some of the more recent data sources (Microsoft Academic, Dimensions, and COCI). At that time, COCI was the smallest of the six indexes, containing only 28% of all citations. For comparison, Web of Science contained 52%, and Scopus contained 57%. …”

Coverage of open citation data approaches parity with Web of Science and Scopus | OpenCitations blog

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“The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is an advocacy group that has been working since 2017 to achieve this precise goal, and it has already managed to convince a large number publishers (over two thousand) to open the references they deposit in CrossRef. In the first half of 2021, Elsevier, the American Chemical Society, and Wolters Kluwer joined this group, so that today all the major scholarly publishers now support I4OC and have open references at Crossref, with the exception of IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Thanks to the efforts of I4OC and the collaboration of publishers, 88% of the publications for which publishers have deposited references in CrossRef are now open. This has allowed organizations such as OpenCitations (one of the founding members of I4OC) to create a non-proprietary citation index using these data, namely COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. Other open citation indexes such as the NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC) and Refcat have also been recently released.

How do such open citation indexes compare to long-established indexes? In 2019, I set out with colleagues to analyze the coverage of citations contained within the most widely used academic bibliographic data sources (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar) to a selected corpus of 2,515 highly-cited English-language documents published in 2006 from 252 subject categories, and to compare this to the coverage provided by some of the more recent data sources (Microsoft Academic, Dimensions, and COCI). At that time, COCI was the smallest of the six indexes, containing only 28% of all citations. For comparison, Web of Science contained 52%, and Scopus contained 57%. …”

In pursuit of rich article-level metadata: 5 elements journal publishers should prioritize

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“As noted at the start of this post, don’t be discouraged if you can’t add all of the above elements to your article-level metadata. Remember, any metadata enrichment step you take, no matter how big or small, will make a difference in your article discoverability. We recommend taking an iterative approach to metadata enrichment and, above all, focusing on quality over quantity. So be sure to first establish a means of producing clean JATS XML metadata and HTML meta tags for all of your articles and then begin layering on new metadata elements from there.

You don’t have to go the metadata enrichment journey alone either. Service providers can help you produce machine-readable metadata for all of your articles and enrich it. For example, Scholastica automatically generates machine-readable HTML and JATS XML metadata for all articles typeset by our digital-first production service, including automated citation metadata enrichment via machine learning. We also automatically produce machine-readable metadata for all articles published using our Open Access journal hosting platform. And when journals use Scholastica’s peer review management system, they can automatically apply metadata collected during peer review to articles submitted to our production service and/or published via Scholastica’s OA journal hosting platform to save even more time. You can learn more about how Scholastica is helping journals produce richer machine-readable metadata here.

Also, be sure to use the metadata checking resources available to you. For example, if you’re registering DOIs for articles via Crossref, you can use the Crossref Participation Reports tool to quickly see which elements your metadata includes and which are missing….”

The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing, summer 2021

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“Despite being so crucial, citations — the pieces of metadata that serve as references to works — are often ignored in discussions of types of open knowledge. Historically, citations and their cross-references have been laboriously collected (by hand, then by computational techniques) in bibliographic indexes. These indexes, once published in serial print volumes, are today generally offered as web-based, paywalled subscription products by scholarly entities or for-profit companies. Indexing and abstracting services are big business: Web of Science, an academic journal and proceedings index that has existed since the 1960s, can cost subscribing libraries hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Web of Science is currently owned by Clarivate, which in 2020 had revenues of 1.2 billion USDundefined from its portfolio of analytics and intellectual property management tools that monetize the research process….”

The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing

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“In recent years, there has been a push to openly license citation metadata to better enable large-scale analyses and discoverability of scholarly work. The “Initiative for Open Citations” (I4OC),undefined launched in 2017, has led the way in helping publishers share citations to their works under a public domain CC0 license. As of early 2021, over a billion citations from one scholarly article to another are collected in public domain databases, a major shift from just a few years earlier.undefined These open databases provide the backbone for new discovery tools, and are used by academics training artificial intelligence tools. Open corpora like the Microsoft Academic Graph are themselves widely cited.undefined However, Microsoft Academic Graph will be shuttered in 2021; despite their importance, new citation projects are reliant on continued funding and support by their host, and longevity is not always guaranteed….

Wikidata is a freely licensed and editable online database of linked data, with 94 million items as of June 2021.undefined Like its sister project Wikipedia, it has a vibrant multilingual volunteer community that develops and maintains it, and is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata also includes bibliographic metadata: as of June 2021, nearly 40 million items on Wikidata represented publications, accounting for 43% of all items.undefined These are a combination of semi-automated uploads of citations from other open databases, items about notable publications that have their own Wikipedia articles, and items added manually by editors. Wikidata is also attractive for libraries, archives, and cultural institutions that want to make their metadata more openly available and reusable, and there are several ongoing projects to incorporate Wikidata into library and archival cataloging processes and connect Wikidata to new open knowledgebases….”

The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing

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“In recent years, there has been a push to openly license citation metadata to better enable large-scale analyses and discoverability of scholarly work. The “Initiative for Open Citations” (I4OC),undefined launched in 2017, has led the way in helping publishers share citations to their works under a public domain CC0 license. As of early 2021, over a billion citations from one scholarly article to another are collected in public domain databases, a major shift from just a few years earlier.undefined These open databases provide the backbone for new discovery tools, and are used by academics training artificial intelligence tools. Open corpora like the Microsoft Academic Graph are themselves widely cited.undefined However, Microsoft Academic Graph will be shuttered in 2021; despite their importance, new citation projects are reliant on continued funding and support by their host, and longevity is not always guaranteed….

Wikidata is a freely licensed and editable online database of linked data, with 94 million items as of June 2021.undefined Like its sister project Wikipedia, it has a vibrant multilingual volunteer community that develops and maintains it, and is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata also includes bibliographic metadata: as of June 2021, nearly 40 million items on Wikidata represented publications, accounting for 43% of all items.undefined These are a combination of semi-automated uploads of citations from other open databases, items about notable publications that have their own Wikipedia articles, and items added manually by editors. Wikidata is also attractive for libraries, archives, and cultural institutions that want to make their metadata more openly available and reusable, and there are several ongoing projects to incorporate Wikidata into library and archival cataloging processes and connect Wikidata to new open knowledgebases….”

Crossing a significant threshold: more than one billion citations now available in COCI! | OpenCitations blog

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“Now, a new significant milestone has been reached. We are enthusiastic to announce that COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations has just been extended with 334 million additional citations. Its most recent release, the COCI July 2021 release, now contains a total of 1.09 billion DOI-to-DOI citation links derived from open references within Crossref,which includes the references of articles deposited or opened in Crossref between November 2020 and January 2021….

These numbers make us proud, and confirm the essential value of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). Since 2018, the mission of I4OC has been to persuade publishers to provide open citation data by means of the Crossref platform. The I4OC untiring commitment has led the major academic publishers to a progressive change of heart regarding open citations, and the scholarly community to a deeper interest in this openness….

A crucial event that preceded (and delayed!) this latest COCI release was Elsevier’s endorsement in the DORA Declaration on Research Assessment in December 2020, thereby making “reference lists for all articles published in Elsevier journals openly available via Crossref so they can be available for reuse. This means other important initiatives like I4OC can draw on this metadata”. As described in our previous post, Elsevier’s welcome commitment led to the opening of many previously closed references from its numerous academic journals submitted to Crossref. Now, after an extended period of data ingestion and processing, all these newly opened Elsevier references are available at OpenCitations within COCI….”

A Tipping Point For Open Citation Data

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Abstract:  Open citation data can improve the transparency and robustness of scientific portfolio analysis, improve science policy decision-making, stimulate downstream commercial activity, and increase the discoverability of scientific articles. Once sparsely populated, public-domain citation databases crossed a threshold of one billion citations in February 2021. Shortly thereafter, the threshold of one billion public domain citations from the Crossref database alone was crossed. As the relative advantage of withholding data in closed databases has diminished with the flood of public domain data, this likely constitutes an irreversible change in the citation data ecosystem. The successes of this movement can guide future open data efforts.

 

 

The era of open citations and an update of tools- Citation Chaser, Wikicite addon for Zotero with citation graph support and more | Musings about librarianship

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“In this blog post, I will report on some major progress I believe have been made in the push for open citations

Firstly, the recent announcement by Elsevier followed by ACS that they will finally support open citations is  pretty earthshaking news as they are among some of the biggest hold outs among publishers

Secondly, I continue to report on the emerging ecosystem of tools that are building upon open citations (from both publsher/Crossref derived sources and via other crawled sources).

Lastly, even if all major publishers pledge to support open citations, we will always have a lot of items that will not be available in Crossref with references either because the items are old, the publishers lack the resources to extract and deposit the references or the items are not given DOIs. …”

Q&A about Elsevier’s decision to open its citations – Leiden Madtrics

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“Last week Elsevier announced that it has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and that it is going to make the reference lists of articles openly available in Crossref. In this Q&A, Ludo Waltman shares his perspective on Elsevier’s decision to open its citations….”