Abstract
Review of: "Finding citations for PubMed: A large-scale comparison between five open access data sources"
Highlights
Title: Finding citations for PubMed: A large-scale comparison between five open access data sources Author: Zhentao Liang, Jin Mao, Kun Lu, Gang Li Submitted to: Scientometrics
It allows one to monitor the status of the free availability of these data and their effectiveness in bibliometrics studies compared with proprietary data sources, i.e. Scopus and Web of Science
I will discuss these aspects as follows. Before commenting on these aspects, though, a full disclosure: I am one of the Directors of OpenCitations and, as such, I am responsible for one of the data sources used by the authors in their experiment, i.e. COCI
Summary
Open Access is a term that is associated with traditional publications (i.e. articles). Open Data does mean that you can freely access such data, but that you can "use, modify, and share [them] for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness)" (see https://opendefinition.org/) This is today the intended definition of Open Data. I would value a lot a comparison between (A) proprietary services (Scopus, Web of Science), (B) open citation indexes (COCI, NIH-OCC, MAG), and (C) freely available data sources (Dimensions, S2ORC). Both (B) and (C) enable reproducibility, but only (B) are "open" as meant by the community – the non-commercial clause in the license of Dimensions and S2ORC is enough for not considering them "open" in terms of the definition above (see https://opendefinition.org/licenses/nonconformant/). I suggest that the authors revise the text to consider these three categories A, B, and C, listed above
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