Data Carpentry supports I4OC

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Our increasing capacity to collect data is changing how we can look at the world. This data we’re collecting has the most promise when it is accessible to all researchers, for all types of inquiry and wherever people do work and ask questions. Open data not only increases the potential for discovery, but also adds to the research’s impact, resulting in more citations and attention to the work. It is also a fundamental element of reproducible research, allowing others to better understand the research and build on the work that has been done.

That’s why Data Carpentry is proud to be one of the founding stakeholders of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). I4OC is “a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data.” Six organizations (OpenCitations, the Wikimedia Foundation, PLOS, eLife, DataCite, and the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University) founded I4OC and announced its establishment last week. Already I4OC has increased the number of publications with freely available datasets in Crossref from 1% to 40%. 29 publishers have already chosen to deposit and open up citation data.

The Internet Archive, Mozilla, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and 29 other projects and organizations have formally put their names behind I4OC as stakeholders in support of openly accessible citations.

See I4OC’s full press release for more information on the project.