Initiative pushes to make journal abstracts free to read in one place

Initiative pushes to make journal abstracts free to read in one place

A single site for free journal abstracts

A group of publishers has pledged to make abstracts of research papers free to read, all in one place. The publishers will submit their article summaries to Crossref, an agency that registers scholarly papers’ unique digital object identifiers (DOIs). Crossref will make the abstracts available in a common format that is machine-readable and easily searchable. So far, 52 publishers have signed up to the initiative, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the US National Academy of Sciences. The goal is to boost the reach and reuse of scientific results, but some scientists have questioned whether it goes far enough to make research more widely available.

Nature | 3 min read