Problem

Citations are an essential part of our scientific research process. It gives us access to important prior work on which a study is based, and reflects how a work influences other research or even is essential to that other work. The Initiative for Open Citations encourages all citations to be publicly available. This does not require open access to the article itself, but just the citations from the reference list. Making references available removes barriers to access this critical part of scholarly communication and helps to not repeat previously published work.

While many societies and publishers have joined this initiative, the American Chemical Society has not yet. By not joining they limit the sharing of knowledge for unclear reasons.



Solution

The American Chemical Society joins the Initiative for Open Citations.



Personal story

My research is into abstract representation of chemical information, important for other research to be performed. Indeed, my work is generally reused, but knowing which research fields my work is used in, or which societal problems it is helping solve, is not easily retrieved or determined.

Efforts like WikiCite and Scholia do allow me to navigate the citation network, so that I can determine which research fields my output influences and which diseases are studied with methods I proposed. But this relies on open citations.