ECS is proud to announce its partnership with the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). By joining forces with I4OC, ECS has opened up citation data, further expanding accessibility to scientific knowledge by releasing into the public domain reference data published in ECS journals.
This partnership aligns directly with ECS’s Free the Science initiative, which seeks to make our peer-reviewed research free to all readers while remaining free for authors to publish.
“We applaud the efforts of I4OC. In addition to our significant amount of open access full-text content, we are excited to be able to provide yet another mechanism for researchers to freely access a very important part of ECS content,” says Mary Yess, chief content officer for ECS. “Opening up our citations will not only allow scientists and engineers easy access; but because the citations are in common, machine-readable formats, this will also allow them to data mine those citations. All of these open access opportunities are a critical to progress in our fields and others.”
Since its establishment in April, I4OC has worked to partner with publishers to provide accessible citation data. Citations are a central component to scholarly information, providing credibility to statements and bolstering overall discovery and dissemination by highlighting research.
In a traditional scholarly communication system, citation data is often inaccessible to readers behind a paywall. Now, I4OC and its partners are providing unrestricted access to bibliographic and citation data. In just three short months, these efforts have resulted in the percentage of publishers releasing open and accessible references from one percent to over 45 percent.
“The purpose of I4OC is to coordinate these efforts and to promote the creation of a comprehensive, freely-available corpus of scholarly citation data,” reads an I4OC statement. “Such a corpus will be valuable for new as well as existing services, and will allow many more interested parties to explore, mine, and reuse the data for new knowledge.”
The partnership between ECS and I4OC reinforces the Society’s commitment to opening access to scientific knowledge and democratizing research. ECS believes the more we open scientific knowledge, the faster we can advance our important science and society at large.
