Cassidy Sugimoto is Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington. She researches within the domain of scholarly communication and scientometrics, examining the formal and informal ways in which knowledge producers consume and disseminate scholarship. She has edited and co-edited four books and has published numerous journal articles on this topic. Her work has been presented at numerous conferences and has received research funding from the US National Science Foundation, Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Sloan Foundation, among other agencies. Cassidy is actively involved in teaching and service and has been rewarded in these areas with an Indiana University Trustees Teaching award (2014) and a national service award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (2009). She served as the President of the faculty at Indiana University in 2015-2016 and is currently serving as President of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Cassidy has an undergraduate degree in music performance, an M.S. in library science, and a Ph.D. in information and library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
ISSI supports I4OC
The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) brings together publishers and researchers to “promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data.” This collaborative endeavor has encouraged several publishers—including the Royal Society of Chemistry, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley—to publicly release their reference metadata. At the beginning of the initiative, only 1% of the citation metadata collected annually by Crossref was publicly available. As of June, 2017, nearly 45% of these data were available.
The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) joins with the several other organizations—including funding agencies, for-profit companies, professional organizations, libraries, and bibliometric research centers—to acknowledge the importance of this initiative and to encourage other publishers to participate. Specifically, the ISSI Board approved the following endorsement for the Initiative for Open Citations:
“The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) strongly supports the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). Citation analysis is the one of the key methods of our field; however, this research is dependent upon access to citation data, which are largely available through expensive licensing and library subscriptions. As a result, large-scale analyses are often concentrated within a few key research centers who can afford access to full licenses. This disadvantages junior scholars and those from countries without access to the data and precludes them from making contributions commensurate with their potential. We therefore fully endorse I4OC as it attempts to ‘promote the availability of data on citations that are structured, separable, and open.’ Such an initiative provides greater access for the research community to openly and transparently ask questions on the science of science and enhances the replicability of this research. We encourage all publishers to engage in this initiative to allow scholars better access to data that can reveal important information on the structure of science.”