Citations are the threads that weave together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They serve as primary data that provide provenance and explain how we know what we know. Citations allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In essence, citations are the key vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge.

We deposit reference lists from our journal articles to Crossref as part of our participation in Crossref’s Cited-by service. By opening our references and the other bibliographic metadata sent to Crossref, we enable reference distribution for all of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) prefixes they manage. This step allows references within Crossref members’ articles to be distributed without restriction through all of Crossref's Metadata Delivery services, including the REST API and bulk metadata dumps.

 By using Crossref’s Cired-by service we  and support The Initiative of Open Access Citation  I4OC which  is part of a broader movement promoting the openness of bibliographic metadata.