[BOAI] Fwd: [Force11] Opening reference lists for inclusion in the Open Citations Corpus

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from David Shotton, with his permission. The original is dated
January 7, 2013. --Peter Suber.]

 Dear colleagues,

Happy New Year!

I thought you would like to be aware of the following e-mail, that I am
sending to all publishers I know personally.  I have already written to the
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, the International Association
of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, and the Association of
Learned and Professional Society Publishers, asking them to distribute the
open letter to all their members.  CrossRef will also distribute it with
its quarterly newsletter later this month.  PLoS, Hindawi and BMC have
already signed up.

If you are able to forward this to publishers you know personally, who are
in a position to effect this Open Citations policy for their journals, I
would be most grateful.

I have tried to eliminate cross-postings, but apologies if anyone has also
received this information through a different channel.

David

= = =

Dear ***,

Last week, on January 3rd, I published an open letter to scholarly journal
publishers asking them to open the reference lists from their journal
articles for inclusion in the expanding Open Citations Corpus (OCC).  This
letter, which is described in and linked to from my blog post *Open letter
to publishers*<http://opencitations.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/open-letter-to-publishers/>,
contains a draft e-mail to CrossRef, reproduced below, to be used by
individual publishers, permitting CrossRef to open that publisher's
reference lists for harvesting by OCC.

I am now writing to you personally to ask you to send a copy of this
e-mail, suitably completed, to support at crossref.org, permitting the
reference lists from your journal articles to be made open.  Alternatively,
if you are not in a position to make this decision, please forward the
e-mail to the appropriate person, and copy me in on that forward.  Thanks.

Provided a publisher is already depositing article references with CrossRef
as part of the CrossRef CitedBy Linking
<http://www.crossref.org/citedby/>service, all the publisher need to
do is to inform CrossRef that it is
willing for CrossRef to freely distribute these reference, for example in
response to queries against the CrossRef XML API.  We will then harvest
them from CrossRef and incorporate them as open linked data in the Open
Citations Corpus<http://opencitations.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/open-citations-extension-project/>
.  If not already a subscriber to the CrossRef CitedBy
Linking<http://www.crossref.org/citedby/>service, a publisher can
register for this useful service free of charge.
Having done so, there is nothing further the publisher needs to do to
‘open’ its reference data, other than to give its consent to CrossRef.

********Please note that even if some or all of your journals are already
Open Access, it is still necessary for you to inform CrossRef of your
willingness for CrossRef to make your reference lists available, because
CrossRef policy is that all publishers, including open access publishers,
have to *opt in* to any distribution of references that CrossRef makes.
However, this need only happen once.  Thereafter, there is nothing more you
need to do - CrossRef and OCC will do the rest.

Many thanks indeed.  This small act will contribute significantly to the
growing movement towards fully open science advocated so eloquently by the
Royal Society in its report *Science as
*<http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/science-public-enterprise/report/>
*an Open Enterprise*<http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/science-public-enterprise/report/>,
published last June.

David****

=== ****

To support at crossref.org  Subject: Permission to publish reference lists
from journal articles****

I am writing on behalf of *** [name of publisher] to confirm that *** [name
of publisher] is willing for the bibliographic reference lists within the
articles in [delete as necessary:] *all our journals *[or] *the attached
list of journals *be made freely available by CrossRef, for inclusion in
the Open Citations Corpus. These journals are associated with the following
DOI prefix(es): 10.**** [Please complete DOI prefix(es) – see footnote]. ***
*

Yours sincerely [name, position, date]
=== ****

*Footnote*: Publisher's DOI prefixes are listed at
http://www.crossref.org/06members/50go-live.html by name of publisher. ****

- - -   ****

Dr David Shotton ****

Research Data Management and Semantic Publishing Research Group****

Department of Zoology, University of Oxford ****

South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK. ****

Phone: +44-(0)1865-271193    Skype: davidshotton   ****

** **
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