The web of citations among scientific publications builds a comprehensive knowledge network revealing many insights into the nature of science. Public access to citation data is therefore an important cornerstone for an open scholarly infrastructure. It improves the visibility of the scientific output and enables researchers, data scientists, institutions, as well as third-party providers to develop exciting services like impact analyses, discovery tools or visualizations far beyond the scope of individual publishers.

For all these reasons, the MPDL full heartedly supports the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) launching today. A growing group of publishers have already made the decision to release citation data publicly and we kindly invite all our publishing partners to join the movement by turning on reference distribution for all DOIs in Crossref.

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adopted from: "citation needed" (CC BY 2.0) by Dan4th

Please find more datails in the I4OC press release and show your support by following the initiative on twitter.