Via Science – Dalmeet Singh Chawla – “…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. Conversations about opening up citation data initially took place this past September at the eighth Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, in response to a report that found that just 3% of almost a thousand publishers depositing data on Crossref were making citation data open. In practice, that meant that citation data were available for just 1% of the roughly 35 million papers on Crossref, says Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, California…”