The American Society for Microbiology Joins the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)
Washington, D.C. – February 12, 2018 – We are pleased to announce that the American Society for Microbiology has joined the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC).
The Initiative for Open Citations I4OC is a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data. It aims to establish a global public web of linked scholarly citation data to enhance the discoverability of published content, explore connections between knowledge fields, and follow the evolution of ideas and scholarly disciplines. The ASM is excited to support the many benefits of the I4OC, including:
• Researchers will be able to study the dissemination of methods and scientific ideas
• Authors will gain machine-readable access to references for all their papers
• Funding organizations will be able to rely on this public resource to develop transparent and reproducible evaluation metrics and create new tools to assess the academic and societal impact of research they fund
• Members of the public will be able to trace information back to its source or reuse it in open knowledge repositories such as Wikipedia and Wikidata.
“Joining I4OC is an important step towards establishing standards to connect published content globally and we believe this integrated network will facilitate and better illuminate connections within and between fields in the scientific community.” said Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO, ASM.
Participating Publishers:
Before I4OC started, publishers releasing references in the open accounted for just 1% of citation metadata collected annually by Crossref. Following discussions over the past months, several subscription-access and open-access publishers have recently made the decision to release reference list metadata publicly. These include: American Geophysical Union, Association for Computing Machinery, BMJ, Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, EMBO Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, SAGE Publishing, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. These publishers join other publishers who have been opening their references through Crossref for some time.
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The American Society for Microbiology is the largest single life science society, composed of over 30,000 scientists and health professionals. ASM's mission is to promote and advance the microbial sciences.
ASM advances the microbial sciences through conferences, publications, certifications and educational opportunities. It enhances laboratory capacity around the globe through training and resources. It provides a network for scientists in academia, industry and clinical settings. Additionally, ASM promotes a deeper understanding of the microbial sciences to diverse audiences.