Abstract
Open citation data can improve the transparency and robustness of scientific portfolio analysis, improve science policy decision-making, stimulate downstream commercial activity, and increase the discoverability of scientific articles. Once sparsely populated, public-domain citation databases crossed a threshold of one billion citations in February 2021. Shortly thereafter, the threshold of one billion public-domain citations from the Crossref database alone. Since the relative advantage of withholding data in closed databases has diminished with the flood of public-domain data, this likely constitutes an irreversible change in the citation data ecosystem. The successes of this movement can guide future open data efforts.
Highlights
Science builds on the knowledge of past discoveries to advance the frontier of research
The broad coverage of public domain citation data means that these resources are well suited for use in scientometric analyses that traditionally used proprietary data
This community has uniquely contributed to the development of public domain citation data, and I exhort its members to transition from using proprietary citation data to using these comprehensive public domain data sources in their projects as much as possible
Summary
Science builds on the knowledge of past discoveries to advance the frontier of research. The fraction when looking at journal articles only is higher, with 92% having opened their references This accounting overestimates the fraction of all citations that are publicly available, as many print-only articles precede widespread indexing in Crossref, or publishers have not yet supplied reference information for the digital articles that are included. Combining the references from the NIH Open Citation Collection and the PubMed Knowledge Graph shows that 86% of this union is explicitly public domain. While this estimate applies to the biomedical literature, it can anchor expectations for coverage in other fields as well. This result reinforces estimates that over 85% of Crossref citations are entering into the public domain
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