A presentation by Marilena Daquino, Silvio Peroni and David Shotton, at Open Science Fair 2019.
Category Archives: oa.i4oc
Set citation data free
“However, most poll respondents felt that citation-based indicators are useful, but that they should be deployed in more nuanced and open ways. The most popular responses to the poll were that citation-based indicators should be tweaked to exclude self-citations, or that self-citation rates should be reported alongside other metrics (see ‘The numbers game’). On the whole, respondents wanted to be able to judge for themselves when self-citations might be appropriate, and when not; to be able to compare self-citation across fields; and more….
But this is where there is a real problem, because for many papers citation data are locked inside proprietary databases. Since 2000, more and more publishers have been depositing information about research-paper references with an organization called Crossref, the non-profit agency that registers digital object identifiers (DOIs), the strings of characters that identify papers on the web. But not all publishers allow their reference lists to be made open for anyone to download and analyse — only 59% of the almost 48 million articles deposited with Crossref currently have open references.
There is, however, a solution. Two years ago, the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) was established for the purpose of promoting open scholarly citation data. As of 1 September, more than 1,000 publishers were members, including Sage Publishing, Taylor and Francis, Wiley and Springer Nature — which joined last year. Publishers still to join I4OC include the American Chemical Society, Elsevier — the largest not to do so — and the IEEE….”
OASPA and the Initiative for Open Citations – OASPA
“One of the goals of OASPA is to support the transition to a world in which open access becomes the predominant mode of publication. As we have charted in the annual statistics on the growth of open content published using various Creative Commons licenses, steady progress is being made (see for example the most recent update). We are now introducing a new membership requirement for OASPA to increase openness, specifically of citation data.
Another area where publishers have helped to make progress towards greater openness is in the provision of metadata. Many members of OASPA already deposit metadata with Crossref and make this data openly available. There are good reasons for publishers to do this – it can help with the discoverability of content whether it is open access or behind subscription barriers. To find out whether a particular publisher deposits metadata and makes those data available, Crossref has introduced a service called Participation Reports (example here)….”
OASPA and the Initiative for Open Citations – OASPA
“One of the goals of OASPA is to support the transition to a world in which open access becomes the predominant mode of publication. As we have charted in the annual statistics on the growth of open content published using various Creative Commons licenses, steady progress is being made (see for example the most recent update). We are now introducing a new membership requirement for OASPA to increase openness, specifically of citation data.
Another area where publishers have helped to make progress towards greater openness is in the provision of metadata. Many members of OASPA already deposit metadata with Crossref and make this data openly available. There are good reasons for publishers to do this – it can help with the discoverability of content whether it is open access or behind subscription barriers. To find out whether a particular publisher deposits metadata and makes those data available, Crossref has introduced a service called Participation Reports (example here)….”
Unlocking 100 years of scientific papers: How Scholarcy partnered with BMJ to further I4OC | Scholarcy | The long-form article summariser
“Reference mining is fundamental to the creation of citation networks and rich, discoverable digital libraries. In recent years, a number of tools have been developed to address this need, but they are often limited by input format, infrastructure requirements and runtime performance. The most recent developments in this space have focused on reference mining PDFs from arts and humanities literature, but there’s a growing need for a fast, accurate way of extracting and parsing references from a wide range of documents and formats across the full research landscape….
From requirements gathering, algorithm refinement, to the process of extracting over 2 million citations as validated XML records in CrossRef, the entire project ran for 12 weeks. Publications which particularly benefited included the British Medical Journal itself (279,000 new records), Gut (177,000), Journal of Clinical Pathology (171,000) and Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry (168,000).
99.9% of the extracted records were fully valid XML. In only 0.1% of cases, the XML required some manual correction to meet CrossRef validation standards. The records were uploaded to CrossRef and are now available as open citations for anyone to reuse….”
MIT Press to co-publish new open-access Quantitative Science Studies journal | MIT News
“The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) has announced the launch of a new journal, Quantitative Science Studies (QSS). QSS is owned by ISSI, the primary scholarly and professional society for scientometrics and informetrics, and will be published jointly with the MIT Press in compliance with fair open access principles.
QSS will be a journal run for and by the scientometric community. The initial editorial board will be fully constituted by the former editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics (JOI), an Elsevier-owned journal. The transition of the editorial board from JOI to QSSwas initiated by the unanimous resignation, on Jan. 10, of all members of the JOIeditorial board. The editorial board members maintain that scholarly journals should be owned by the scholarly community rather than by commercial publishers; that journals should be open access; and that publishers should make citation data freely available. The members of the board had been unsatisifed with Elsevier for not meeting their expectations, and they therefore resigned their positions.
The content for QSS will be open access and therefore freely available for readers worldwide. Funding for establishing and marketing the new journal has been provided in part by the MIT Libraries. To ensure access for authors, the MIT Press will charge a comparatively low per-article charge, which will be fully covered by the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology for the first three years of operation, with support of the Communication, Information, Media Centre of the University of Konstanz. The funds from TIB will be managed by the Fair Open Access Alliance to ensure that the journal is operating under fair open access principles. The MIT Press is also a full participant in the I4OC initiative, which promotes unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data….”
Editorial board of Journal of Informetrics resigns and launches new journal
“Today, the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) announces the launch of the new journal Quantitative Science Studies (QSS), published by MIT Press. The editorial board of QSS consists of the members of the former editorial board of Journal of Informetrics (JOI), an Elsevier journal. The members of the editorial board of JOI, which include CWTS researchers Nees Jan van Eck, Anthony van Raan, and Paul Wouters, have unanimously resigned and have moved to QSS. An important reason for the resignation is Elsevier’s lack of support for the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). Disagreements about journal ownership and open access policies have played a role as well….”
The longer Elsevier refuses to make their citations open, the clearer it becomes that their high…
“The Open Citations movement is something I’ve been watching with interest. It hasn’t really broken through into the mainstream yet, like Open Access has, because it’s a bit of a more complex topic and the benefits of it aren’t readily apparent. The main idea behind it is that publishers should add all the listed references for an article (i.e. the sources being cited by that article) to that article’s metadata and make this citation data open on platforms like Crossref….
The benefits of Open Citations are clear right? So what’s the hold up? Why don’t we have this now? Well, it’s time we return to an ongoing theme of this blog which is trying to guilt trip Elsevier into doing the right thing. All the large scholarly publishers (Wiley, Springer, Taylor and Francis, Sage) are now providing open references to Crossref. You can search Crossref Participation Reports yourself and see. Elsevier is the only one holding out….
Elsevier is between a rock and hard place here. They’re the only scholarly publisher with a citation database tool like Scopus. Every other publisher gets a clear benefit from opening up their citations, but for Elsevier it threatens the number of subscriptions to Scopus. With Open Citations, a tool like Scopus becomes less valuable, but if they keep their citations closed they’re directly impeding the progress of research….
If Scopus is actually, truly, threatened by open citations, then isn’t it clear that this is a tool that only existed because of Elsevier created artificial scarcity to grow their profit margin? …”
Editors of Informetrics resign at Elsevier and start new journal – ScienceGuide
“As more and more editorial boards come into conflict over the open science policies of their journal, one decides to resign and take their expertise elsewhere. Today the entire editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics, a major publication in the field of Scientometrics and Informetrics, has unanimously resigned their position. In the future they will dedicate their time to a new full open access journal: Quantitative Science Studies. Robert-Jan Smits: “I hope that this example will inspire many more to follow suit.“
The move has been in the making for over a year tells Johan Rooryck (Leiden University), an expert in the field of flipping journals. He was involved in the transition on behalf of the Fair Open Access Alliance and explains the origin of the move. “It basically comes down to a conflict between the editorial board and Elsevier over the openness of the journal. In this case the availability of citation data was a major issue.”
In their response to a shifting landscape major publishing houses are preparing for a future where citation data and other metrics are expected to become much more important aspect of their business. It is therefore not unexpected that publishers want to retain ownership over this type of valuable data. Last year the European Commission was openly criticised for the involvement of Elsevier in the Open Science Monitor leading to a formal complaint to the European Ombudsman….”
Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal
“The entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics resignedThursday in protest over high open-access fees, restricted access to citation data and commercial control of scholarly work.
Today, the same team is launching a new fully open-access journal called Quantitative Science Studies. The journal will be for and by the academic community and will be owned by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). It will be published jointly with MIT Press.
The editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics said in a statement that they were unanimous in their decision to quit. They contend that scholarly journals should be owned by the scholarly community rather than by commercial publishers, should be open access under fair principles, and publishers should make citation data freely available.
Elsevier said in a statement that it regretted the board’s decision and that it had tried to address their concerns.
“Since hearing of their concerns, we have explained our position and made a number of concrete proposals to attempt to bridge our differences,” Tom Reller, vice president of global communications at Elsevier, said in a statement. “Ultimately they decided to step down and we respect that decision and wish them the best in their future endeavors.”
Elsevier’s response to the board’s requests can be accessed in full here.
This is not the first time the editorial board of an Elsevier-owned journal has quit to start a competing journal. In 2015, the editorial board of top linguistics journal Lingua made headlines by leaving their postsand announcing plans to start a rival open-access publication called Glossa….”