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.īut more is needed. The opening up of citation data is welcome. Nature’s news team is independent of its publisher.) (Springer Nature, publishers of Nature, joined the initiative in 2018. A Nature editorial in 2019 called for those publishers still dragging their feet to jump on board (see Nature 573, 163–164 2019). Uptake in some quarters, including among some big publishers, was initially slow. That’s largely thanks to the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a collaboration between academic publishers, researchers and other stakeholders, which since its launch in 2017 has been encouraging publishers to make citation data open. Last month, Crossref announced that the citation data associated with the more than 60 million journal articles in its database were now openly available for downloading and use.įive-year campaign breaks science’s citation paywall This system is administered by Crossref, a non-profit association based in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, that has around 15,000 publishers, funding agencies and other institutions as members. Most online papers are identified with a unique set of characters called digital object identifiers (DOIs). Even if access was granted, they wouldn’t be able to make public the proprietary data on which their findings were based.
Credit: GettyĪ few years ago, researchers would find considerable hurdles when attempting to study citation patterns to illuminate trends in a field, identify new areas of research interest or pinpoint questionable practices such as excessive self-citation.įirst, they’d need to request access to one of the large scholarly databases containing citation data, such as Web of Science or Scopus. Assessing how papers cite each other has been a painful business until now.
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