Stephan Kuster, head of institutional relations

Today sees the launch of - and Frontiers' commitment to - the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I40A). The cross-publisher project, officially launched at this year’s Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association conference, advocates for the unrestricted availability of abstracts throughout scholarly communications.  I4OA’s overarching aim is to promote the discovery of, and large-scale access to, critical research.

The collaboration of scholarly publishers, academic librarians, researchers, and infrastructure providers, is calling for all abstracts to be made open and distributed through the non-for-profit organization, Crossref. The initiative follows the success of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), which launched with considerable applaud in 2017.

Frontiers is committed to contributing to the I4OA initiative and helping replicate the success of I4OC. We are pleased to be named as having stated our support and enthusiasm for it and look forward to the additional layer of impact and discoverability the initiative will bring. By making abstracts universally accessible, publishers – even those that continue to operate a subscription-led model – allow access to a detailed summary of any given piece of content. This increases its searchability (by both man and machine), and ultimately, makes it more likely that the research will be exploited to its full potential.

As an open-access native, I4OA’s raison d’etre aligns keenly to Frontiers’ own: to enable healthy lives on a healthy planet through unrestricted access to scientific research. Frontiers’ abstracts, like all our content, are already open access. However, by joining I4OA as a publisher, our abstracts and the associated metadata will be deposited on Crossref, therefore adding a further layer of support to the broader OA community’s mission to make all science open. It will benefit our authors in terms of visibility and citability, and as importantly, all those that consume and use their research in the future.

As of today, 34 publishers and more than 50 stakeholders, including research funders, libraries and library associations, infrastructure providers, and open science organizations have indicated their support for the initiative which is hugely pleasing. I would highly recommend watching the progress of this exciting project in the coming months.

You can stay up to date by following: @open_abstracts on Twitter and by visiting: https://i4oa.org/