Initiative for Open Abstracts Launches to Promote Discovery of Research

A new cross-publisher initiative calls for unrestricted availability of abstracts to boost the
discovery of research

The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) calls on scholarly publishers to open their abstracts, and specifically to deposit them with Crossref. Unrestricted availability of abstracts will boost the discovery of research. 34 publishers have already agreed to support I4OA and to make their abstracts openly available. I4OA is also supported by a large number of research unders, libraries and library associations, infrastructure providers, and open science organizations.

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) 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.

Stuart Taylor, Director of Publishing at the Royal Society says:“Abstracts summarize the content ofscholarly publications, and their wide availability will boost discoverability and draw readers, both humanand machine, to the full text”

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.

Many abstracts are already available in various bibliographic databases, but these sources have limitations, for example because they require a subscription, are not machine-accessible, or are restricted to a specific discipline.

“Bringing the abstracts from many publishers and from multiple disciplines together without these restrictions will enable new kinds of discovery tools and analyses, without requiring us to individually scrape millions of article pages at thousands of publisher websites”, says Vincent Larivière, Professor of Information Sciences at l’Université de Montréal.

“Making abstracts available only for human (eyeball) reading on publisher websites is not sufficient” addsLudo Waltman, Deputy Director of Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies and coordinator of I4OA.

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, crossdisciplinary 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 atCrossref.

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.

34 publishers, listed below, have already agreed to support I4OA and to submit their abstracts to Crossref. Support for I4OA has also been expressed by over 50 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.

I4OA was inspired by the success of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), which encourages the submission of references to Crossref. Since the launch of I4OC in 2017, over two thousand scholarly publishers have chosen to make the reference lists of their journal articles and book chapters openly available through Crossref. I4OA, which will be announced at the OASPA conference on September 24th 2020, aims to replicate the success of I4OC by achieving a rapid jump in the open availability of scholarly
abstracts via Crossref.

Mandy Hill, Managing Director of Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press, said: “Authors’abstracts are a key tool for literature discovery, and we’re delighted to support this initiative to create a high quality corpus of freely accessible abstracts in Crossref.”

Stephanie Paalvast, Head of Open Research at Brill, said: “At Brill we are already experiencing the advantages of opening up abstracts on the impact of the research we publish. It has helped our authors to receive more downloads, our journals to become more visible; and supports institutional and funder ambitions for open metadata. We are delighted to join the efforts of I4OA to maximize the uptake of this practice across the publishing industry, and ultimately contribute to enhanced access and impact.”

Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen, said: “I strongly support the efforts of I4OA to make abstracts freely accessible alongside article metadata. Already many publishers are convinced that it is in the best interest of authors and journals to open their abstracts, as it leads to more views and greater impact of their work. I4OA is exactly what we need now to raise awareness of the advantages for publishers of open abstracts and to promote metadata best practices.”

Contact & further information

Further information may be obtained from the I4OA webinar on October 5th 2020 at 4 pm CEST (register at https://bit.ly/32zcOVH), from the I4OA website at https://i4oa.org (live from September 24th 2020), by emailing Ludo Waltman, coordinator of I4OA, at openabstracts@gmail.com. or by following @open_abstracts on Twitter.

I4OA team
Helen Duce (SAGE)
Ginny Hendricks (Crossref)
Bianca Kramer (Utrecht University)
Vincent Larivière (Université de Montréal)
Catriona J. MacCallum (Hindawi Ltd)
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)

Supporting publishers (last updated: September 15th 2020)
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Beilstein Institut
Brill
British Academy
British Institute of Radiology
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
De Gruyter
EDP Sciences
eLife
European Mathematical Society
European Respiratory Society (ERS)
Frontiers
F1000
Geological Society of London
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
The Company of Biologists
Thomas Telford (Institution of Civil Engineers)
Ubiquity Press
University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) ePress

Supporting stakeholders (last updated: September 15th 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
cOAlition S
Coko Foundation
Confederation of Open Access Repositories
ContentMine
CORE
DataCite
DBLP
Digital Science
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Dryad
Dutch Research Council (NWO)
Eigenfactor
Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL)
Érudit
EuropePMC
Fair Open Access Alliance
FORCE11
Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication
International Network of Research Management Societies (INORMS)
Lens
Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL)
Metadata 2020
Microsoft Research
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
Open Knowledge Maps
OPEn Research Analytics (OPERA)
OpenAIRE
Our Research
Redalyc
Research Council of Norway (RCN)
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)
TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library
Ukrainian Citation Index
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
Wellcome Trust