ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has joined the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA), a collaboration between publishers, infrastructure organizations, librarians, and researchers to promote the open availability of abstracts.
By joining I4OA, ACM commits to making abstracts of articles published by ACM available in an open and machine-readable way. Abstracts will be submitted to Crossref, initially for journal articles published by ACM and in a next stage also for conference papers. Bringing abstracts together in a common format in a global cross-disciplinary database offers important opportunities for text mining, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence.
Scott Delman, Director of Publications at ACM, emphasizes the importance of making abstracts and other metadata openly available: “ACM fully supports the open availability of metadata of scientific outputs. As shown in our Crossref Participation Report, we are making rich metadata available for articles published in our journals. This includes abstracts and references, and we expect to add other metadata elements, in particular ORCID identifiers, in the near future. Openness of abstracts and other metadata will boost the discoverability and impact of research published by ACM.”
Ludo Waltman, Coordinator of I4OA, says, “We are excited to have ACM as a supporter of I4OA. ACM plays a leading role in the field of computer science in terms of its contribution to the open availability of publication metadata. In addition to abstracts, ACM also makes references, affiliations, funding data, and license data openly available through Crossref. We encourage other organizations in the field of computer science to follow the example set by ACM.”
Find out more on the I4OA website.
About the Initiative for Open Abstracts
I4OA is a collaboration between scholarly publishers, infrastructure organizations, librarians, researchers and other interested parties to advocate and promote the unrestricted availability of the abstracts of the world's scholarly publications, particularly journal articles and book chapters, in trusted repositories where they are open and machine-accessible. I4OA calls on all scholarly publishers to open the abstracts of their published works, and where possible to submit them to Crossref.
This article was first published on May 20 by ACM.
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