Charter on Open Citations
A key topic discussed at the National Informatics Associations workshop held during ECSS 2021 in Madrid was an initiative to build an Informatics-specific bibliometric resource based on combining the DBLP database with openly available citation data from the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). The meeting agreed to promote an Open Citations Letter to all publishers in the area of Informatics to release their citation data to benefit the common good. Many major publishers are already onboard, and with this letter we wish to achieve a comprehensive coverage of the citations in the area of Informatics.
If you would like to support the initiative and the Open Citations Letter,
please sign it as an organisation or individual.
See here the list of organizations and individuals who have already signed the letter.
Open citations: an open letter to publishers of research in Informatics
In April 2017, six organizations announced the establishment of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data. The main goal of this initiative has been to convince all major publishers to freely share their bibliographic metadata and citation data through appropriate infrastructures such as that provided by Crossref [1].
The open availability of citation data is crucially important in science since open citation data: can improve the transparency and accessibility of research, the discoverability of research outputs such as publications, data, and software; can support policy decision-making [2], and can help in illuminating possible issues in science evaluation and referencing practices [3].
As reported on the I4OC website in October 2021, over the past four years the fraction of publications with open references has grown from 1% to 88% of the 56.9 million articles with references deposited with Crossref. The huge availability of open citation data has permitted the creation of several national and international infrastructures and collections – such as OpenCitations [4], the NIH Open Citation Collection [5], the Open Ukrainian Citation Index [6], and the data made available on Wikidata [7] by WikiCite community. These have been reused by several applications and services, such as DBLP and VOSviewer [8]. In February 2021, the availability of open citations data worldwide surpassed the important threshold of one billion citations [2], and it continues to grow.
Several publishers working with Informatics scholars and professionals, including the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Elsevier, and Springer Nature, have joined I4OC and are actively contributing to the release of such open citation data. However, the coverage of open citation data of Informatics research is far from being complete and some publishers, including some of the largest ones, have not yet opened their article reference lists already deposited at Crossref.
By means of this letter, we urge those publishers with closed references, or with references that have not been submitted to a central repository such as Crossref, to change their stance and to confirm their willingness to work for the benefit of Informatics and the whole of humanity by releasing their citations, “the core elements of scholarly communication that permit the attribution of credit and integrate our independent research endeavours” [9], and by so doing to acknowledge their citation data as a public good.
References
1. Hendricks, G., Tkaczyk, D., Lin, J., & Feeney, P. (2020). Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), 414–427. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00022
2. Hutchins, B. I. (2021). A tipping point for open citation data. Quantitative Science Studies, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_c_00138
3. Nature editorial: Set citation data free. (2019). Nature, 573(7773), 163–164. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02669-3
4. Peroni, S., & Shotton, D. (2020). OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), 428–444. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00023
5. Hutchins, B. I., Baker, K. L., Davis, M. T., Diwersy, M. A., Haque, E., Harriman, R. M., Hoppe, T. A., Leicht, S. A., Meyer, P., & Santangelo, G. M. (2019). The NIH Open Citation Collection: A public access, broad coverage resource. PLOS Biology, 17(10), e3000385. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000385
6. Cheberkus, D., & Nazarovets, S. (2019). Ukrainian open index maps local citations. Nature, 575(7784), 596–596. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03662-6
7. Vrandečić, D., & Krötzsch, M. (2014). Wikidata: A free collaborative knowledgebase. Communications of the ACM, 57(10), 78–85. https://doi.org/10.1145/2629489
8. van Eck, N. J., & Waltman, L. (2010). Software survey: VOSviewer, a computer program for bibliometric mapping. Scientometrics, 84(2), 523–538. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0146-3
9. Shotton, D. (2013). Open citations. Nature, 502(7471), 295–297. https://doi.org/10.1038/502295a