Today the letter Open citations: A letter from the scientometric community to scholarly publishers was published on the website of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). In this letter, scientometricians make a call to scholarly publishers to support the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and to make the reference lists of the articles they publish openly available. Freely available citation data wiill improve the reproducibility of scientometric research and will help to make scientometric analyses more transparent. A large number of scholarly publishers already support I4OC, but support from a few major publishers is still lacking.

Earlier this year, CWTS already gave public support to I4OC. As a next step, together with colleagues from other centers, a number of CWTS researchers have taken the initative for an open letter in which scientometricians express their support for open citations. At the time of publication, the letter had already been signed by 25 individuals. Since there is an online option for signing, the number of signatures is expected to increase further. Scientometricians who wish to sign the letter are invited to do so at the website of ISSI.