We’ve proud to join the stakeholder group of the Initiative for Open Abstracts, a sister project to Initiative for Open Citations. Making abstracts openly available and machine-readable helps readers discover relevant research. For more on why this is important, see this explainer.
Open abstracts are important for preprints as well as published journal articles. The report from our January #bioPreprints2020 meeting recommends abstracts as “desired” metadata for preprints. EuropePMC and PMC both require them for indexing of preprints. For example, several preprint servers (including bioRxiv, medRxiv, and Research Square, among others) deposit abstracts to Crossref, but some do not, so there’s still work to be done in this area to ensure that preprints are as discoverable and reusable as possible.
As a stakeholder for I4OA, we encourage all preprint servers to make their abstracts freely available through Crossref and other mechanisms for distributing metadata.
