Participation Report - Open References

Hi everyone!

I would like to know what would be a reason (might be one! :thinking:) for someone (publisher/journal, etc) to decide to not choose to set the references to be openly available…

It is a good question Bruna.

A new reference distribution policy was adopted by the board in 2017 and came into effect on January 1st, 2018. Any member joining since then are set to ‘Open’ by default. Any member can choose to set their references to ‘Open’, ‘Limited’, or ‘Closed’ at any time.

I think those publishers who do not believe in open access choose closed references.

|Reference setting|Description|

|Closed|Your references are only used for the Crossref Cited-by service and are not distributed via any of the public Crossref interfaces.|

|Limited|In addition, organizations that sign an agreement for our Metadata ‘Plus’ service can access your references. (This is the default for older accounts)|

|Open|Everyone can access your references through our open APIs. (This is the default for accounts joining from 2018)|

Still, I request some of support members to throw light on this topic for better understanding.

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Hi Anjum, thank so much, those descriptions were actually very helpful and clarifying :slightly_smiling_face:

Hi @BrunaErlandsson and @Anjum,

Thanks for this discussion. Maybe some of our members who have set their references to limited or closed will join this thread and provide their thinking on reference distribution. Anjum, is correct; our default setting for new members is to make references open.

Prior to joining Crossref, I worked with one of our member-publishers. That member-publisher made their references open a few years ago. Prior to that, there was thinking within the organization that there might be an opportunity to monetize the reference data. When the member-publisher decided to open their references, thinking within the organization had shifted. They believed that the benefits of making their references open outweighed the other potential benefits of keeping the references closed.

I have heard other members express this shift in thinking. As for other members and their decisions about reference distribution, I’ll defer to them.

I hope my answer is helpful.

Best,
Isaac

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Oh, ok, even clearer now, haha. Thanks for helping me to understand…

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