ScienceOpen supports the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)

Today, the I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations) announced new supporting publishers joining to release reference data for more than 16 million articles. This is a major step forward as publishers such as Emerald, the American Physical Society, SciELO and De Gruyter team up with Springer/Nature, Wiley, Sage and many more to unlock the powerful information encoded in citation networks.

ScienceOpen joins the growing list of stakeholders who support the I4OC initiative, alongside OASPA (the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), Jisc, and the LIBER (the Association of European Research Libraries).

What does ScienceOpen have to do with the I4OC?

The analysis of citation data is at the core of what we do at ScienceOpen. Citations trace academic networks, describe research genealogies, and uncover ideas. They enable a great range of functions dependent on the connections and context that they reveal to us.

There are several ways in which we use citation data at ScienceOpen:

1. To sort publications by citation numbers. There are nearly always too many papers to read through them all. So every search result list on ScienceOpen can be filtered and sorted by citation numbers to find relevant articles. This powerful filter is supplemented by Altmetric score, usage, date, and more.
2. To sort reference lists by citation numbers. The reference list of a paper is an important discovery tool for researchers, but often with 50-100 references. The sort and search tools at ScienceOpen allow both a quick overview and in depth searching within the reference section – now for many more papers with the I4OC initiative!
3. To increase visibility of open content. If your article cites 50 papers, there will be 50 more article pages on ScienceOpen that point back to your original paper. The increased linkage helps to define networks of similarity that show the right paper to the user searching for information.
4. To provide citation information for any author on our platform. Integrate your ORCID and claim your publications today, and you can track your citations through time.

Here’s my citation metadata, so use me maybe

At ScienceOpen, we provide all of these features to our users for free. In fact, you don’t even have to sign up to use most of them. Our goal is simple: to make it easy for researchers to explore different levels of context in the published literature, and make their search and discovery experience efficient and fun.

Dario Taraborelli, Director and Head of Research at Wikimedia Foundation, said “I am thrilled to count ScienceOpen among the organizations joining the I4OC: ScienceOpen has been leading by example by using open metadata to make scholarly knowledge more discoverable. I look forward to seeing open citations from the I4OC further enhance and strengthen their initiatives.”

At the moment, the citation counts are based only on article metadata ingested into ScienceOpen. Through the I4OC initiative, the amount of data we can integrate has now gone up enormously. This means that we can continuously refine the accuracy of our citation data for you all.

CEO of ScienceOpen, Stephanie Dawson said “We are delighted to offer our support to the I4OC initiative. There is so much value that can be obtained by opening up citation metadata. We are excited to be able to use these to provide better services for publishers and researchers alike.”

At ScienceOpen, we will keep working with publishers to help promote their research in context too. We fully support the I4OC, and hope that by demonstrating the usage of open citations at ScienceOpen, we can help them fulfill their mission.