Introducing the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA)

Initiative for Open Abstracts Launches to Promote Discovery of Research
A new cross-publisher initiative calls for unrestricted availability of abstracts to boost the discovery of research

The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) calls on scholarly publishers to open their abstracts, and specifically to deposit them with Crossref. Unrestricted availability of abstracts will boost the discovery of research. 40 publishers have already agreed to support I4OA and to make their abstracts openly available. I4OA is also supported by a large number of research funders, libraries and library associations, infrastructure providers, and open science organizations.

The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) calls on all scholarly publishers to open the abstracts of their publications, and specifically to distribute them through Crossref, in order to facilitate large-scale access and promote discovery of critical research. I4OA—a collaboration between scholarly publishers, academic librarians, researchers, infrastructure providers and other stakeholders—will launch at the online conference of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) on September 24th 2020.

I4OA has been established to advocate and promote the unrestricted availability of the abstracts of scholarly publications, particularly journal articles and book chapters.

Making abstracts openly available helps scholarly publishers to maximize the visibility and reach of their journals and books. Open abstracts make it easier for scholars to discover, read and then cite these publications; promotes their inclusion in systematic reviews; expands and simplifies the use of text mining, natural language processing and artificial intelligence techniques in bibliometric analyses; and facilitates scholarship across all disciplines by those without subscription access to commercial bibliographic services.

I4OA was inspired by the success of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), which encourages the submission of references to Crossref. Since the launch of I4OC in 2017, over two thousand scholarly publishers have chosen to make the reference lists of their journal articles and book chapters openly available through Crossref. I4OA aims to replicate the success of I4OC by achieving a rapid jump in the open availability of scholarly abstracts.

Contact & further information
Further information may be obtained from the I4OA website at https://i4oa.org (live from September 24th 2020), by emailing Ludo Waltman, coordinator of I4OA, at openabstracts@gmail.com, or by following @open_abstracts on Twitter.

There will be also a webinar on I4OA on October 5th 2020 at 4 pm CEST (register at https://tinyurl.com/i4oa-webinar),