Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.
Advertisement
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar
You have full access to this article via your institution.
Most articles in scientific journals are indexed by Crossref.Credit: Getty
The more than 60 million scientific-journal papers indexed by Crossref — the database that registers DOIs, or digital object identifiers, for many of the world’s academic publications — now contain reference lists that are free to access and reuse.
The milestone, announced on Twitter on 18 August, is the result of an effort by the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), launched in 2017. Open-science advocates have for years campaigned to make papers’ citation data accessible under liberal copyright licences so that they can be studied, and those analyses shared. Free access to citations enables researchers to identify research trends, lets them conduct studies on which areas of research need funding, and helps them to spot when scientists are manipulating citation counts.
Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
“This is fantastic,” says Jodi Schneider, an information scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who has used citation data to examine whether studies that cite retracted papers mention that the papers have been pulled. “Citation data is the bedrock of science.”
At its launch, I4OC partnered with 29 scholarly publishers to open up references in 14 million papers. Five years on, that number has risen to more than 60 million, covering all the journal papers indexed on Crossref, a non-profit collaboration that promotes sharing of scholarly information. The citing papers and those being cited might still be behind a paywall, but their reference lists are not. (Crossref indexes about 134 million records in total, including articles that do not have reference lists.)
The move means that bibliometricians, scientometricians and information scientists will be able to reuse citation data in any way they please under the most liberal copyright licence, called CC0. This, in turn, allows other researchers to build on their work.
Before I4OC, researchers generally had to obtain permission to access data from major scholarly databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, and weren’t able to share the samples.
However, the opening up of Crossref articles’ citations doesn’t mean that all the world’s scholarly content now has open references. Although most major international academic publishers, including Elsevier, Springer Nature (which publishes Nature) and Taylor & Francis, index their papers on Crossref, some do not. These often include regional and non-English-language publications.
I4OC co-founder Dario Taraborelli, who is science programme officer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and based in San Francisco, California, says that the next challenge will be to encourage publishers who don’t already deposit reference data in Crossref to do so.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02926-y
Set citation data free
The science that’s never been cited
Initiative aims to break science’s citation paywall
‘Papermill alarm’ software flags potentially fake papers
News
Citation data are now open, but that’s far from enough
Editorial
Zero tolerance for threats against scientists
Editorial
A guide to the Nature Index
Nature Index
Register animal-tracking tags to boost conservation
World View
Map soil nutrients to tackle imbalances worldwide
Correspondence
Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL)
Saint Louis, MO, United States
Elsevier Inc.
London, Greater London, United Kingdom
University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder)
Boulder, CO, United States
Tisch MS Research Center of New York
New York, NY, United States
You have full access to this article via your institution.
Set citation data free
The science that’s never been cited
Initiative aims to break science’s citation paywall
An essential round-up of science news, opinion and analysis, delivered to your inbox every weekday.
Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.
Advanced search
© 2022 Springer Nature Limited