APS News

APS Joins the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)

Authors and researchers will get unrestricted access to Physical Review journal citation information

July 11, 2017

Starting on July 11, APS will begin participating in the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a collaboration among scholarly publishers to make information freely available about what papers are cited by a given journal article. This information had always been available to those subscribing to the Physical Review journals, but now the citation data will be open to all.

"This is great for authors and researchers," said APS Publisher Matthew Salter. "Authors can track which colleagues are citing their work, and researchers can now have greater access to the network of scientific literature which will make it easier to find new routes into the literature and make new connections among scientific disciplines."

A large number of both commercial and nonprofit publishers (including APS) currently deposit citation information with Crossref, an organization that enables a journal articles to have live links to papers in other journals. As a result of APS partnering with I4OC, that information will now be made freely accessible without a journal subscription.

According to I4OC, the aim is to make the bibliographic data structured, separable, and open: "Structured means the data representing each publication and each citation instance are expressed in common, machine-readable formats … Separable means the citation instances can be accessed and analyzed without the need to access the source bibliographic products (such as journal articles and books) ... Open means the data are freely accessible and reusable."

The new service is open to all through Crossref and is offered at no cost to readers of the Physical Review journals. "APS is happy to be partnering with the I4OC" said APS Editor in Chief Pierre Meystre. "We believe that this will become a valuable service to the research community and is in line with APS’ mission to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics."

For more information: Initiative for Open Citations

i4oc logo text