The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is a project launched publicly in April 2017,[1][2][3][4][5][6] that describes itself as:[7][8] "a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data and to make these data available."

They are also available from the OpenCitations Corpus, a database that harvests citation data from Crossref and other sources.

[5] The stated benefits of this approach are: 1. discoverability of published content; 2. the building of new services, and 3. creation of a public citation graph to explore connections between knowledge fields.

[11] The initiative was established in response to a paper on citations in Wikidata, Citations needed for the sum of all human knowledge: Wikidata as the missing link between scholarly publishing and linked open data, given by Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation, at the eighth Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, in September 2016.

[17] Elsevier claimed in response that they could not release their data for free due to loss of licensing revenue from their proprietary Scopus citation services.