One of the important factors for visibility increasing and scientific publication’ ranking is the list of references, used by a scientist or a group of scientists in the preparation of materials. From a scientific point of view, the article will be more significant if it contains links to the latest developments and relevant research.

     If we want to allow all interested persons to have access to references – this references need to be fully opened (visible) in the global information space. Why do we need open reference lists? What does it affect, besides the rating of publications? What benefit scientists will have? First of all, it is beneficial for the editions itself, because this step distribute links to all interested users, without limitation, through all Crossref Metadata Delivery Services, including the REST API and mass metadata dumps. But only if the publication has DOI, and its metadata is included to  the CrossRef database.

     In 2017, the Initiative for Open Citation has received significant support from the scientific community, whose main objective is to widen access to publication’ citation data. The program was supported by such well-known publishers of academic literature as Springer Nature, Wiley, Cambridge University Press, and many others.

     It is important to note that databases have an important role in Initiative for Open Citations. And we can’t ignore Crossref here, because its library has more than 90 million documents. Since 1st January 2018, Crossref has launched an Open References policy, which was announced to all partners at the beginning of the year.

     After the launch of this program, SA «Ukrinformnauka» was one of the first who added the following participants to the list of publishers with open references (SA «Ukrinformnauka» is Crossref member, who has been offering the services of the assigning DOIs to the Ukrainian editions since 2014):

- Ukrinformnauka (Prefix 10.15407, this prefix have all jounals of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, which have a contract with Ukrinformnauca. Today it’s already 45 journals);

- Lviv Polytechnic National University (Prefix 10.23939 – 6 journals);

- Danylo Halytskyi Lviv National Medical University (Prefix 10.25040 – 5 journals);

- Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Prefix 10.26693 – 1 journal);

- National Bank of Ukraine (Prefix 10.26531 – 1 journal).

     In July 2018, another five members were added to this list:

- Kharkiv Medical Academy of Postgraduate Education (Prefix 10.31071);

- State Publishing House "Agrarian Science" of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences (Prefix 10.31073);

- National University of Bioresources and Natural Resources of Ukraine (Prefix 10.31548);

- Lviv National Agrarian University (Prefix 10.31734);

- Yuri Fedkovich Chernivtsi National University (Prefix 10.31861).

     As we can see, 10 publishers are already participating in the Initiative for Open Citations (which is more than 50 journals), and this number is increasing. And, therefore, the visibility of Ukraine's scientific periodicals in the world's information space is actively rising!