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takyon writes:

Now free: citation data from 14 million papers, and more might come

Consider this: A scientist publishes a study citing other papers. Those cited papers, in turn, cite studies that came before them. But much of that citation information—which is often of great interest to scientists tracking research trends and hot topics—has not been available freely.

Enter the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a project aiming to make citation data free to all, formally announced today by six organizations, including the Wikimedia Foundation, publisher Public Library of Science, and the open-access journal eLife. So far, the initiative has partnered with 29 journal publishers to enable anyone to access citation data from about 14 million papers indexed by Crossref, a nonprofit collaboration that promotes the sharing of scholarly information. And more publishers are likely to sign on, says Mark Patterson, executive director of eLife, in Cambridge, U.K.

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