At OpenCitations, we have always described ourselves as community-driven and community-governed infrastructure. This definition deeply reflects our nature, since OpenCitations was born as a non-profit Open Science infrastructure to support open scholarship for the benefit of the scholarly community, and it continues to rely on that same community for its sustainability and governance, through memberships and participation in strategic decision-making processes.
For this reason, it is essential for us that both our technical development and our outreach activities remain aligned with the real needs of the academic community. Over the past year, we have focused on strengthening our technical infrastructure and increasing awareness of OpenCitations’ values and activities. We are now entering a phase in which future priorities and developments need to be defined, at a time when the landscape of open citation services has become more crowded and complex. This makes it increasingly important for OpenCitations to clarify its positioning within the research ecosystem.
To address this need, we came up with a simple insight: instead of assuming what the community needs, we decided to ask directly. This intuition led to the idea of launching a Community Survey. Developed with the support and guidance of the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, the survey was open to anyone in the academic community, including users, members, and people encountering OpenCitations for the first time. It was intentionally broad, covering both technical and outreach aspects. Its goal was not to evaluate performance, but to better understand how OpenCitations is perceived, used, and expected to evolve.
The survey was open from 20 October to 16 December 2025, and we would like to sincerely thank everyone who took the time to respond and to help disseminate it within their networks. The feedback we received was of high quality, showing a strong level of engagement and a genuine willingness to provide thoughtful answers, especially through the open-ended questions.
Respondents came from a wide range of backgrounds, primarily within academia and research, including researchers, librarians, information specialists, developers, and professionals working on research infrastructures and scholarly communication. Affiliations were mostly universities, research institutes, libraries, and non-profit infrastructures, reflecting a community already closely connected to Open Science practices. Levels of familiarity with OpenCitations varied considerably, from regular users to people who discovered the infrastructure for the first time through the survey.
Across responses, OpenCitations was consistently associated with strong values such as openness, transparency, reproducibility, and independence from commercial interests. A recurring theme is the trust in the quality of the data and in the team maintaining the infrastructure. At the same time, awareness of specific services was uneven. While bibliographic and citation databases are relatively well known, more technical components such as APIs, data models, and SPARQL endpoints are mainly familiar to technically experienced users.
This perception was reflected by usage patterns: OpenCitations often operates behind the scenes, with its data adopted within repositories and other scholarly tools. Citation analysis and metrics are another common use case, where OpenCitations is valued as an open alternative data source to proprietary databases. More specialised applications, such as knowledge graph construction and editorial workflows, were also mentioned, highlighting the flexibility of open citation data.
When it comes to choosing OpenCitations over other databases, one of the strongest motivations is alignment with Open Science values. Respondents repeatedly emphasised the importance of open licences and the public-good orientation of the infrastructure. At the same time, several barriers remain, concerning in particular the limited coverage in certain areas, delays in data updates, technical complexity, and fragmented documentation. Another limit to adoption is the lack of awareness, together with institutional reliance on commercial databases.
Regarding community engagement, awareness of OpenCitations often spreads through informal academic networks, conferences, workshops, and mailing lists. Active participation, however, remains limited, since many respondents follow OpenCitations’ activities without directly engaging. Still, there is a clear interest in deeper involvement, especially when it comes to contributing to Open Science, learning new skills, and aligning with institutional priorities around openness and transparency.
Looking ahead, respondents expressed strong expectations around the expansion and enrichment of citation data, improved interoperability with other infrastructures, tutorials to support non-technical users, and more user-friendly interfaces.
We are very glad to have opened this dialogue with the community. While some of the feedback confirmed issues we were already aware of, the survey also revealed we had not fully considered, particularly regarding how OpenCitations is perceived within the broader community. Overall, the Community Survey confirms that OpenCitations is widely recognised as a valuable and trustworthy open infrastructure for open science. At the same time, it highlights concrete areas for improvement, especially in usability, coverage, and community engagement.
We see this survey not as a conclusion, but as a starting point for ongoing dialogue. The detailed results of the survey, including charts and word clouds, are available on Zenodo for public consultation:
Di Giambattista, C., & Peroni, S. (2026). Summary Report of the OpenCitations Community Survey 2025. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18470862
This survey now opens a phase of reflection that will inform future steps in our roadmap, and may also lead us to repeat this experiment in the future, exploring alternative formats for community engagement beyond surveys. Above all, we look forward to sharing concrete outcomes of this collaborative process with the community, as we continue to build OpenCitations with the community and for the community.


