Initiative pushes to make journal abstracts free to read in one place

Publishers agree to make journal summaries open and searchable in single repository. This new cross-publisher initiative, launched on 24 September by Stuart Taylor at OASPA Conference, calls for unrestricted availability of abstracts to boost the discovery of research. Publishers involved in I4OA, the Initiative for Open Abstracts, have agreed to submit their article summaries to Crossref, which will make the abstracts available in a common format. It also aims to emulate I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations), an initiative established three years ago to make metadata and bibliographical references openly available through Crossref. Since its launch, 2,000 publishers have signed up to I4OC.