Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) Launches to Promote Discovery of Research, New Cross-Publisher Initiative Calls for Unrestricted Availability of Abstracts

From Today’s I4OA Launch Announcement:

The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) calls on all scholarly publishers to open the abstracts of their publications, and specifically to distribute them through Crossref, in order to facilitate large-scale access and promote discovery of critical research. I4OA—a collaboration between scholarly publishers, academic librarians, researchers, infrastructure providers and other stakeholders—will launch at the online conference of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) on September 24th.

I4OA has been established to advocate and promote the unrestricted availability of the abstracts of scholarly publications, particularly journal articles and book chapters.

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Making abstracts openly available thus helps scholarly publishers to maximize the visibility and reach of their journals and books. Open abstracts make it easier for scholars to discover, read and then cite these publications; promotes their inclusion in systematic reviews; expands and simplifies the use of text mining, natural language processing and artificial intelligence techniques in bibliometric analyses; and facilitates scholarship across all disciplines by those without subscription access to commercial bibliographic services.

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Crossref is a not-for-profit infrastructure organization used by many publishers to register and share Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for their publications.

Crossref already has the capacity to bring abstracts together in a common format in one global, cross-disciplinary repository through an open API. At present however, publishers submit abstracts for only ~7% of the publications that we record, says Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member & Community Outreach at Crossref.

I4OA calls on all scholarly publishers using Crossref to make their abstracts openly available by depositing them with Crossref. This can be done as part of established workflows that publishers already have in place for submitting publication metadata to Crossref.

40 publishers, listed below, have already agreed to support I4OA and to submit their abstracts to Crossref. Support for I4OA has also been expressed by 56 other stakeholders, also listed below, including global research funders, libraries and library associations, infrastructure providers, and open science organizations, demonstrating the importance and relevance of this Initiative to the scholarly community.

Learn More, Read the Complete Launch Announcement

Direct to I4OA FAQ

I4OA Team

Helen Duce (SAGE)
Ginny Hendricks (Crossref)
Bianca Kramer (Utrecht University)
Vincent Larivière (Université de Montréal)
Catriona J. MacCallum (Hindawi Ltd)
Ian Mulvany (BMJ)
Cameron Neylon (Curtin University)
Silvio Peroni (OpenCitations and University of Bologna)
David Shotton (OpenCitations and University of Oxford)
Cassidy R. Sugimoto (Indiana University Bloomington and International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics)
Aaron Tay (Singapore Management University)
Stuart Taylor (The Royal Society)
Bryan Vickery (Crossref)
Ludo Waltman (Leiden University)

Founding Publishers

Hindawi Ltd
SAGE
The Royal Society

Supporting publishers (last updated: 23 September 2020)

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Beilstein-Institut
BMJ
Brill
British Academy
British Institute of Radiology
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Copernicus
EDP Sciences
eLife
EMBO
EMS Press
European Respiratory Society (ERS)
F1000
Frontiers
Geological Society of London
Hindawi
IntechOpen
International Union of Crystallography (IUCr)
IWA Publishing
Leibniz-Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID)
MDPI
MIT Press
PeerJ
Portland Press (Biochemical Society)
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
Public Library of Science (PLOS)
Royal College of General Practitioners
Royal College of Psychiatrists
RTI Press
S. Karger
SAGE
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics (LZI)
The Company of Biologists
The Royal Society
Thomas Telford (Institution of Civil Engineers)
Ubiquity Press
UCL Press
University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) ePress
Walter de Gruyter

Supporting stakeholders (last updated: 23 September 2020)

Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)
AmeliCA
ASAPbio
Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER)
Association of Research Libraries
Association of Research Managers and Administrators UK (ARMA UK)
Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
British Library
California Digital Library (CDL)
Center for Open Science
CiteSeerX
Clarivate
cOAlition S
Coko Foundation
Confederation of Open Access Repositories
ContentMine
CORE
DataCite
dblp computer science bibliography
Digital Science
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Dryad
Dutch Research Council (NWO)
Eigenfactor
Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL)
Érudit
Europe PMC
Fair Open Access Alliance
FORCE11
Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication
Hypothesis
International Network of Research Management Societies (INORMS)
Knowledge Futures Group
Lens
Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL)
Metadata 2020
Microsoft Research
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
Open Knowledge Maps
OPEn Research Analytics (OPERA)
Open Ukrainian Citation Index
OpenAIRE
Our Research
Redalyc
Research Council of Norway (RCN)
Research on Research Institute (RoRI)
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition Europe (SPARC Europe)
SciELO
ScienceOpen
SciTech Strategies
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
Wellcome Trust