The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with 29 publishers and a network of organizations, including the Public Library of Science (PLOS), the Internet Archive, Mozilla, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and many others, announced the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), which aims to make citation data freely available for anyone to access.
Scholarly publishers deposit the bibliographic record and raw metadata for their publications to Crossref. Thanks to a growing list of publishers participating in I4OC, reference metadata for nearly 15 million scholarly papers in Crossref’s database will become available to the public without copyright restriction.1 This data includes bibliographic information (like the title of a paper, its author(s), and publication date), machine readable identifiers like DOIs (Digital Object Identifier, a common way to identify scholarly works), as well as data on how papers reference one another. It will help draw connections within scientific research, find and surface relevant information, and enrich knowledge in places like Wikipedia and Wikidata.
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/04/06/initiative-for-open-citations/