Funders should mandate open citations

The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) aims to allow free access to scholarly citation data and to build analytical services on those raw data. The initiative was launched in April 2017 and resulted in the creation of a repository called the Open Citations Corpus (OCC). David Shotton, co-Director of OCC and co-founder of I4OC, explains the milestones of the project, the results achieved so far and the barriers. He argues that publishers should ensure that all citations are included in reference lists, and should make this bibliometric data openly available in a searchable format. He calls on all stakeholders to campaign for this initiative.