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A new cross-publisher initiative calls for unrestricted availability of abstracts to boost the The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA<\/a><\/span>) 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<\/a><\/span> and to make their abstracts openly available. I4OA<\/a><\/span> is also supported by a large number of research unders, libraries and library associations, infrastructure providers, and open science organizations.<\/strong><\/p>\n The Initiative for Open Abstracts<\/strong> (I4OA<\/a><\/span>) 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><\/span>\u2014a collaboration between scholarly publishers, academic librarians, researchers, infrastructure providers and other stakeholders\u2014will launch at the online conference of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) on September 24th.<\/p>\n (I4OA<\/a><\/span>) 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><\/span>\u2014a collaboration between scholarly publishers, academic librarians, researchers, infrastructure providers and other stakeholders\u2014will launch at the online conference of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) on September 24th.<\/p>\n Stuart Taylor, Director of Publishing at the Royal Society says:\u201cAbstracts summarize the content ofscholarly publications, and their wide availability will boost discoverability and draw readers, both humanand machine, to the full text\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBringing 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\u201d,<\/i> says Vincent Larivi\u00e8re, Professor of Information Sciences at l\u2019Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al.<\/p>\n \u201cMaking abstracts available only for human (eyeball) reading on publisher websites is not sufficient\u201d<\/i> addsLudo Waltman, Deputy Director of Leiden University\u2019s Centre for Science and Technology Studies and coordinator of I4OA<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n Crossref is a not-for-profit infrastructure organization used by many publishers to register and share Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for their publications.<\/p>\n \u201cCrossref 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\u201d,<\/i> says Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member & Community Outreach atCrossref.<\/p>\n I4OA<\/span><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 34 publishers, listed below, have already agreed to support I4OA<\/a><\/span> and to submit their abstracts to Crossref. Support for I4OA<\/a><\/span> 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.<\/p>\n I4OA<\/a><\/span> 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<\/a><\/span>, 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 Mandy Hill, Managing Director of Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press, said: \u201cAuthors\u2019abstracts are a key tool for literature discovery, and we\u2019re delighted to support this initiative to create a high quality corpus of freely accessible abstracts in Crossref.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Stephanie Paalvast, Head of Open Research at Brill, said: \u201cAt 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<\/a><\/span> to maximize the uptake of this practice across the publishing industry, and ultimately contribute to enhanced access and impact.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen, said: \u201cI strongly support the efforts of I4OA<\/a><\/span> 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<\/a><\/span> is exactly what we need now to raise awareness of the advantages for publishers of open abstracts and to promote metadata best practices.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Contact & further information<\/strong><\/p>\n Further information may be obtained from the I4OA<\/a><\/span> webinar on October 5th 2020 at 4 pm CEST (register at https:\/\/bit.ly\/32zcOVH<\/a><\/span>), from the I4OA website at https:\/\/i4oa.org<\/a><\/span> (live from September 24th 2020), by emailing Ludo Waltman, coordinator of I4OA, at openabstracts@gmail.com<\/a><\/span>. or by following @open_abstracts on Twitter.<\/p>\n
\ndiscovery of research<\/strong><\/i><\/p>\n
\nabstracts via Crossref.<\/p>\n