New Large-Scale Initiative Aims To Increase Open Access To Scholarly Research

By Kim Treanor for Intellectual Property Watch

The Wikimedia Foundation, Public Library of Science (PLoS), and other publishers and research organisations have announced an initiative aimed at increase the amount of scholarly citation data freely available online, called the Initiative for Open Citations.

The I4OC initiative is accessible here. At present, there are 66 participating organisations, including 29 publishers and 33 stakeholders, including the Wellcome Trust, Mozilla, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

While scholarly articles are subject to copyright, Wikimedia explains in a blog that citation data typically is part of the public domain. In their announcement, the Initiative for Open Citations said that many major publishers already share their data with Crossref, a non-profit organisation that works to make scholarly content more easily accessible, but only one percent of publications made their references freely available. Although the information is not protected under copyright, it was still difficult to access. According to Wikimedia, the new initiative will increase available citations to 40 percent.

Citations are where researchers acknowledge the origins of their theories and provides resources for the reader on other literature on the subject. The Initiative for Open Citations notes that by creating an open repository of citation data, the public at large will find it easier to discover scholarly research. Commercial data citation databases are common at academic institutions, and the open system will make it easier for individuals to access content even when they are not a member of a university or research facility.

The initiative also believes that an open database will make it easier to explore connections between separate fields of knowledge, and to track the influence of important articles and research over time.

Kim Treanor is an intern at Intellectual Property Watch and a student in the graduate program of International Affairs at the New School in New York, where she studies development, trade and public health.