News Story

KMi Has Joined The I4OA Stakeholders Group

KMi Reporter, Tuesday 24 Nov 2020

KMi has joined the I4OA Stakeholders’ Group, adding its support to their Open Abstract Initiative. This action, launched on 24 September, aims to advocate to all scholarly publishers to open the abstracts of their publications, and specifically to distribute them to trusted repositories where they are open and machine-accessible, in order to facilitate large-scale access and promote discovery of critical research.

This is a joint collaboration between scholarly publishers, librarians, researchers, and infrastructure organisations and KMi is very proud to be part of this large group who are promoting Open Abstracts. Indeed, our Scholarly Knowledge Modelling Mining and Sense Making (SKM3) team, relies heavily on abstracts for their analyses and access to such information is important to achieving their results.

Take, for example, the AIDA Dashboard which is one of the latest products developed by the SKM3 team, a tool for exploring and making sense of scientific conferences. This dashboard allows users to assess the research challenges that a conference is actually addressing, examine the trends of its relevant research topics and how its focus changed over time. To enable this functionality, all research papers published and presented to a conference were annotated using the CSO Classifier. This tool takes as input abstracts and titles and through Natural Language Processing and Semantic Web techniques identifies relevant topics drawn from the Computer Science Ontology. Abstracts have played a key role in the development of this innovative application.

Currently, I4OA is supported by more than 60 publishers, including Cambridge University Press, MIT Press and others, which are committed to making their abstracts openly available by depositing them in Crossref. However, many major publishers like Elsevier, the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Springer Nature and others are still hesitant. On the other hand, more than 60 stakeholders, including Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CORE, Center for Open Science, Harvard Library, UK Research and Innovation and many others, have expressed support for this initiative.

KMi recognises there is a need for unrestricted availability of the abstracts of the world’s scholarly publications and is thrilled to support this Open Abstracts Initiative.