Springer-Nature journals missing abstracts?

Jason Augustyn

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Apr 7, 2023, 11:30:15 AM4/7/23

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My team has noticed that the latest snapshot is missing abstracts for most papers in journals published by Springer-Nature. This includes papers that had abstracts in previous snapshots. Abstract data for these papers is also missing in the API.

Is this a known issue? If so, is there a plan to restore abstract data for these journals? It's a huge problem, since we're now missing abstracts for major journals like Nature.

We're happy to help in any way if we can!

Best,

Jason Augustyn

Chief Technology Officer

BluePath Labs

Casey Meyer

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Apr 7, 2023, 12:42:06 PM4/7/23

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Hi Jason,

We had to remove quite a few Springer Nature abstracts recently due to copyright/licensing issues. The majority were inherited from Microsoft Academic Graph and lacking an open license. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not sure there is much we can do to fix it at this time.

Best,
Casey

Jason Augustyn

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Apr 10, 2023, 9:47:23 PM4/10/23

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That's too bad, Casey. Have you had any direct discussions with Springer about piping their data into OpenAlex? I believe Springer has said they're willing to open their data more, and I would think they'd be keen to show they're being good as their word with flagship journals like Nature.

Casey Meyer

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Apr 12, 2023, 6:04:08 PM4/12/23

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I know! Yes, we had direct communications with them about it. I can chat with Jason Priem to see if there is anything more to add. He was primarily involved.

Casey

Trang Le

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May 3, 2023, 11:17:28 AM5/3/23

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Casey Meyer

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May 3, 2023, 11:39:48 AM5/3/23

to Trang Le, OpenAlex users

Hi Trang,

Most of those articles are part of the Nature portfolio under Springer Nature, so they are impacted as well. For the other ones I checked, we recently made improvements to our system that fetches abstracts, so some of them will be filled in soon. For example, this one will be: https://api.openalex.org/works/W4310159262

Thanks,

Casey

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Casey Meyer

Developer - OpenAlex, Unpaywall

OurResearch: We build tools to make scholarly research more open, connected, and reusable—for everyone.

Bianca Kramer

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May 3, 2023, 12:35:45 PM5/3/23

to Casey Meyer, Trang Le, OpenAlex users

Hi Casey, all,

Oh, that's good news, looking forward to following improved abstract coverage (which is already quite high in most cases!)

Possibly of interest: I recently made this visualization of abstract coverage in OpenAlex by publisher for journal articles 2020-2022, compared to availability in Crossref (so publisher-supplied), for the same set of publisher we visualize abstract availability for on the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) website (see https://i4oa.org/#:~:text=figure). This is using the OpenAlex snapshot from January compared to the Crossref Metadata Plus snapshot up until January, using COKI infrastructure to analyze metadata coverage.

((It should be noted too that IOP is the odd one out I suspect due to inherited MAG coverage prior to 2022, as the OpenAlex percentage for 2022 is right up at close to 100% in both Crossref and OpenAlex), see second chart:

Still need to write up and share these properly :-) but I thought I'd pop them in here as relevant to the discussion on abstract coverage.
Also, let me know if anything jumps out that seems not quite right!

kind regards, Bianca

Bianca Kramer

Sesame Open Science

https://sesameopenscience.org

Jason Augustyn

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May 9, 2023, 10:25:52 AM5/9/23

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Those are really nice visualizations, Bianca.

Casey Meyer

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May 9, 2023, 10:29:17 AM5/9/23

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Thanks Bianca! Great to see that comparison.

Casey

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