The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA)

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. 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 thus 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 calls on all scholarly publishers using Crossref to make their abstracts openly available by depositing them with Crossref. This can be done as part of established workflows that publishers already have in place for submitting publication metadata to Crossref.

34 publishers have already agreed to support I4OA and to submit their abstracts to Crossref. Support for I4OA has also been expressed by over 50 other stakeholders, also listed below, including global research funders, libraries and library associations, infrastructure providers, and open science organizations, demonstrating the importance and relevance of this Initiative to the scholarly community.