Save the dates: OpenCitations October events 

With the numerous September events in which the OpenCitations’ directors have recently been involved behind us, it is now time to announce the participation of our director Silvio Peroni in two October events. 

On Wednesday 6th, Silvio will take part in the Beilstein OpenScience Symposium 2021 (October 5-7), giving a short presentation “Open Citations, an Open Infrastructure to Provide Access to Global Scholarly Bibliographic and Citation Data” during the Poster Flash Talk Presentation (17:10-18:00 CEST). The Beilstein OpenScience Symposium is an annual event that gathers leaders in the FAIR and Open Data movement, covering a wide range of research fields, including biomedical research, physics and social science, and exploring how open data practices are transforming sectors outside academia. The 2021 online edition will present a series of talks addressing the many ways that data transparency contributes to the research progress. Among them, the poster presentations involve short oral presentations on Wednesday, 6th October, to accompany the posters that will be displayed throughout the entire symposium. Poster abstracts are available in the Abstract Book that can be downloaded on Beilstein Symposium’s website: https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/symposia/open-science/program/ .

You can register for the event here: https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/symposia/open-science/registration/

The poster and slides from the presentation are available on Zenodo:

Peroni, S. (2021, October 6). Open Citations, an Open Infrastructure to Provide Access to Global Scholarly Bibliographic and Citation Data—Poster Flash Talk Session slides. Beilstein Open Science Symposium 2021, Virtual Event. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5553025

Peroni, S., Shotton, D. W., & Di Giambattista, C. (2021). Open Citations, an Open Infrastructure to Provide Access to Global Scholarly Bibliographic and Citation Data. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5553040

The second event is the annual European Computer Science Summit (ECSS), organized by Informatics Europe and involving academics, industry leaders, decision makers and others interested in Informatics/Computer Science research and education in Europe. ECSS 2021, “Informatics for a Sustainable Future” (Oct. 25-27), will be held as a hybrid event, involving both online as well as on-site sessions held in Madrid, at the Facultad de Ciencias de la Actividad Física y del Deporte (INEF), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid located at Calle de Martín Fierro, 7

During the last day of the meeting (Oct. 27), Silvio Peroni will be speaking at the “National Informatics Associations Workshop”, an annual workshop organised by Informatics Europe in collaboration with the National Informatics Associations in Europe. This year the workshop will address the themes Informatics in Interdisciplinary Curricula and Research Evaluation in Informatics, thus focusing on an important question: how to recognise, assess and credit research contributions specific to Informatics, such as conference publications and software artefacts. Elaborating on this, Silvio’s talk (to be delivered in person, rather than online!) is entitled “Open citations in Informatics” (9:00 CEST).  

For further information and registrations: https://www.informatics-europe.org/ecss/registration/how-to-register.html

We thank Beilstein Institute and Informatics Europe for involving OpenCitations in these international events, which provide opportunities to promote the OpenCitations infrastructure and services in stimulating environments.

We hope to see you there

Cite this article as: Chiara Di Giambattista, "Save the dates: OpenCitations October events ," in OpenCitations blog, 05/10/2021, https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1383.

OpenCitations in Five Hundred Words

Yesterday I gave a lightning talk at the 2021 OASPA Conference, with the title OpenCitations – what does the future hold? The poster accompanying my talk, published on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526713, is reproduced below.

Poster for 2021 OASPA Conference Lightning Talk

Here is what I said:

= = =

Most of the talks at this conference have focussed on open access to textual content. But open bibliographic metadata is also vitally important, not least to enable the calculation of metrics that are both open and reproducible.

OpenCitations is a not-for-profit open infrastructure that provides such free access to global scholarly citations. We hold dear the values and principles that underpin Open Science, and are early adopters of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) and the FAIR data principles.

Our largest citation index is COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, which currently indexes approximately 1.2 billion citations, released to the public domain under a CC0 waiver.

Our goal is for OpenCitations to provide open bibliographic citation information having scope, depth, accuracy and provenance that surpasses that of the commercial citation indexes, for access to which scholarly institutions presently pay enormous annual subscriptions.

I wish to mention just two of our planned developments:

OpenCitations Meta is a new database that will enable us to store in-house full bibliographic metadata about citing and cited publications. This will have two advantages: It will speed user queries, since we will no longer have to wait for responses to on-the-fly API calls to Crossref and ORCID to retrieve such metadata. More importantly, it will enable us to index the large number of references involving publications that do not have DOIs, something that for technical reasons is presently lacking.

Additionally, we plan to develop new citation indexes over other sources of open references, starting with DOCI, indexing references from DataCite, and NOCI, indexing the content of the NIH Open Citation Collection.

Our progress has until recently been severely manpower-limited. However, OpenCitations was fortunate to have been selected by SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services, as an open infrastructure providing a unique and valuable service, and worthy of crowdfunded financial support by the global stakeholder community of research institutes, academic libraries, funders and publishers.

As a result of the generous support so far provided or pledged by ~50 such institutions, we have already reached about one-third of our requested SCOSS budget, enabling us this year to appoint new staff to start our planned technical developments, to support our community outreach, and to help take our vision forward.

Such financial support is vital for our sustainability, since we generate no income from our provision of free data, services and software. We thus invite you too to contribute to OpenCitations.

However, we also seek community involvement in other ways: participation in the community-led governance of OpenCitations; help in developing our open source software and services; curatorial involvement to improve OpenCitations data; and collaborations with other like-minded infrastructures to develop federated access to open scholarly information of all types, thereby returning control over such information to the academic community that generated it in the first place.

If you would like to work with OpenCitations in any of these ways, please contact me.

Cite this article as: davidshotton, "OpenCitations in Five Hundred Words," in OpenCitations blog, 24/09/2021, https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1355.

Academia’s missing references

No-one is quite sure of the total number of scholarly publications within the global corpus. Indeed that number will be strongly influenced by the degree to which, in addition to books and journal articles, one includes within the definition of scholarly publications ‘grey literature’ such as reports published by official bodies, patents, etc. Consequentially, the total number of scholarly references within those publications is also unknown, and this number too will vary according to the inclusion criteria chosen. Furthermore, Crossref Event Data and similar datasets recording social media mentions of journal articles in blog posts and tweets extends the concept of a reference beyond that used in ‘conventional’ citation indexes such as COCI.

We celebrate the fact that well over one billion bibliographic citations are now openly available under CC0 waivers in NIH OCC (the National Institutes of Health Open Citation Collection) [1,2] and COCI (the OpenCitations Index of Crossref DOI-to-DOI Citations) [3]. Despite present gaps in their coverage, they include references to all the most important publications within the global corpus, because these will all have been cited multiple times.

Open references available from Crossref and other aggregators and indexes

Crossref, with over 1.6 billion open references, is the largest single source of such bibliographic metadata. Significant numbers of references are also available in a variety of other databases, repositories and indexes.

NIH OCC (the National Institutes of Health Open Citation Collection) is a merger of several citation databases, drawing on PubMed for crucial article metadata, and augmenting this with information from full-text articles that have been made freely available on the internet [1]. The CiteSeerX database, the arXiv preprint repository, and the Dryad data repository are examples of different types of infrastructure that also publish open bibliographic references, while there is further availability of article references from open aggregators such as DataCite and Wikidata. These may either use their own DOIs, DOIs from the Crossref DOI registration agency, or no DOIs at all. Either way, those references will not appear in Crossref.

What is lacking is semantic coherence and interoperability between these sources, permitting federated queries across them. This makes difficult the task of obtaining a comprehensive overview of the availability of open bibliographic references.

However, there are even more citations that are not yet freely and easily available anywhere in bulk, relating to the reference lists within publications of a number of distinct types. This blog post explores academia’s missing references – those that have not yet been documented within open freely accessible citation indexes – and what might be done to bring these into the public domain.

1 References that are closed at Crossref

Eight years ago, I wrote

“In this open-access age, it is a scandal that reference lists from journal articles — core elements of scholarly communication that permit the attribution of credit and integrate our independent research endeavours — are not readily and freely available for use by all scholars.” [4]

I stand by that statement, and, through OpenCitations [5], I have been working with colleagues to rectify the situation, as I described in my previous post. The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) can rightly be applauded for its part in encouraging almost all the major academic publishers who deposit references at Crossref to make them open.

The only major scholarly publisher not to be listed as an I4OC Participating Publisher is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), that, having deposited at Crossref reference lists for 58% of its preprints and publications, persists in keeping these deposited references closed and unavailable for indexing and re-use. It is to be hoped that IEEE will now realize that what it looses by not having references openly available outweighs any benefits it might have received from keeping them closed, and will join its fellow publishers in ensuring that its Crossref-deposited references are made open, both for its current issues and for its back-number journal articles. I thus call again upon IEEE to change its present position, as both Elsevier and the American Chemical Society had the courage to do recently, and to instruct Crossref to open all IEEE references. A single email to Crossref Support, with the instruction “Open all references”, is all it would take!

References in Crossref are either open, ‘limited’ or closed. Limited references are available to those subscribing to Crossref Metadata Plus, which includes OpenCitations, but not to the general public. Closed references are not freely available to anyone. The following table shows the number of Crossref works in each category, and the number of references within those categories.


WorksReferencesAverage references per work
Total126,627,618

Without references70,477,843
(55.7% of total)


With references56,149,775
(44.3% of total)
1,734,831,31130.9
Open49,274,155
(38.9% of total)
1,605,120,22932.6
Limited2,933,323
(2.3% of total)
66,459,70422.7
Closed3,942,297
(3.1% of total)
63,251,37816.0
Table 1. Numbers of works and their references recorded in Crossref on 31 July 2021.

2 References not deposited at Crossref for publications with Crossref DOIs

The number of works with Crossref DOIs that lack submitted references is surprisingly large. As of 31 July 2021, 70,477,843 publications (55.7% of all works recorded at Crossref) lacked deposited references (Table 1).

Crossref classifies all types of journal content, including editorials, book reviews and letters, as “journal articles”, thus some of these works without deposited references genuinely lack them. However, the majority are conventional journal articles and books with reference lists that the publishers have simply not deposited at Crossref along with the other metadata for these works.

The average number of references per Crossref work with deposited references is 30.9 (Table 1). If, to make allowance for those works that genuinely lack references, we assume a conservative average of 25 references per work for the 70,477,843 works lacking deposited references, this means that there are over 1.75 billion references within these works that have not been deposited at Crossref, and thus are not conveniently available for indexing and reuse.

These missing references relate both large publishers that have submitted references for only some of their publications, and small publishers that perhaps lack, or think they lack, the resources to deposit any reference lists in addition to the other metadata they are already sending to Crossref for each of their DOIs. However, there are several easy methods for depositing reference lists, as detailed by Crossref here. So I encourage all publishers who are supportive of Open Science to update their procedures and commence or complete the deposition of their publication reference lists at Crossref, starting with their current issues. Crossref Support will provide assistance if required. Note that a publisher does not have to subscribe to the Crossref Cited-by service to deposit its references!

3 Citations missing in COCI: open references in Crossref to publications lacking DOIs

COCI is the OpenCitations Index of Crossref DOI-to-DOI Citations, and, as the name suggests, it indexes Crossref open references from works with Crossref DOIs to other works that have DOIs [3]. It therefore does not index open references in Crossref to works that, for whatever reason, lack DOIs.

The most recent (September 2021) release of COCI, based on the August Crossref dump, contains 1,186,958,898 citations between 69,074,291 unique work, comprising 51,103,720 citing bibliographic resources bearing Crossref DOIs and 56,105,783 cited bibliographic resources. Of the cited bibliographic resources, 38,135,212 bear a DOI issued by Crossref and have open or limited references (thus also being COCI citing resources), while 17,970,571 either have a Crossref DOI but lack open or limited references or have a DOI issued by another DOI registration agency such as DataCite (thus not being COCI citing resources).

Note that in Crossref, the ratio of works with open or limited references to works without open or limited references is 0.7:1 (Table 1). However, in COCI, the ratio of cited works with Crossref DOIs containing open or limited references to all other cited works is 2.1:1. Thus works with Crossref DOIs containing open or limited references are three times more likely to be cited than works that either have a Crossref DOI but lacking open or limited references or have a DOI issued by another DOI registration agency. This is most likely because the most important journals from almost all the larger publishers now have open references. However, it is still a remarkable ratio.

Because references to works lacking DOIs are not included in COCI, the average number of bibliographic references per citing article in COCI is only 23.2, in contrast to the numbers of references to works of all types given in Table 1.

From these data, it can be seen that there are over 480 million open Crossref references to a wide variety of works lacking DOIs that OpenCitations does not index in COCI. This is because of an intentional and fundamental limitation in the structure of the Open Citation Identifier (OCI) [6], requiring both citing and cited publications to have identifiers of the same type, that lies at the heart of the functionality of our OpenCitations Indexes.

OpenCitations is currently developing a solution that, without compromising that intentional design limitation in OCIs, will nevertheless permit us to index and publish these ‘missing’ references as Linked Open Data. We will report on this development in due course.

Crossref Event Data is a Crossref service / database that records mentions of publications bearing Crossref DOIs in social media including tweets and blog posts, and in other non-traditional citation sources such as news items and Wikipedia articles. From today (Thursday 23rd September 2021), Crossref Event Data will start to include in its holdings open references from publications bearing Crossref DOIs to other publications bearing DOIs. Limited and closed references will not be included. Initially, open references from current publications will be included in Crossref Event Data, with open references from older works with DOIs being added later. In that respect it will come to resemble COCI, except that COCI also included ‘limited’ references, treats citations as first-class data entities with their own identifiers, and makes its citation data available in RDF as Linked Open Data, as well as via a REST API. Subsequently, Crossref Event Data will also record references to publications with other forms of identifier, as OpenCitations also plans to do.

4 References available on publishers’ web sites

Many publishers, particularly those of Open Access works, already make their publication reference lists openly available on their own web sites. While this is commendable, it is not sufficient, since, if scholarly references are not made available in a centralized aggregator such as Crossref from which they can be conveniently harvested in bulk for analysis and re-use, they are much more difficult to access.

Scraping references from the HTML of individual web sites is difficult, time-consuming and liable to be incomplete. While Microsoft Academic achieved considerable success in scraping references from publishers’ web sites, possible because of the special relationships these publishers have with the Microsoft search engine Bing, this service will unfortunately soon no longer be available, illustrating a problem inherent with scholarly infrastructures provided by commercial companies that do not adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures.

A consequence is that such publications will become increasingly ‘invisible’, as bibliographic and analytical services come to rely more and more on centrally available data.

6 References within PDFs of scholarly works lacking DOIs

There is a large but unknown quantity of reference-containing books, academic reports, patents and journal articles from publishers that, for their own good reasons, choose not to use DOIs. The text of many of these publications is already available in a marked-up machine-readable format such as JATS, used in preparation for publication, from which the reference lists could easily be extracted. Other publications are only available as PDFs, both as published Versions of Record, or as preprints deposited in a variety of preprint repositories such as arXiv or CORE. Mining reference lists out of PDFs required expertise in text mining and AI technologies, and is labour-intensive, since it usually required the tuning of extraction algorithms to handle the particular styles and formatting of individual journals, one at a time. Two stages are involved: first, the recognition and extraction of the text of the individual references from the PDF, and second the parsing of each text string into the component parts of the reference (author names, title, publication year, etc.) A considerable number of the citations within NIH-OCC have been obtained in this manner [1], commercial companies such as Lexical Intelligence specialize in this area, and publicly available software such as GROBID is available for the purpose. However, the overall task of extracting ‘missing’ academic references from the global PDF corpus is daunting in magnitude and would require a well-funded organization.

The correct way to proceed would be for each publisher to take responsibility for liberating the references of their own publications, whether or not the publications themselves are open access, and whether or not these references are already available in a marked-up machine-readable format or only within PDF documents. Then, if the publisher still chose not to use DOIs and to submit these metadata to Crossref, these references could be submitted directly to OpenCitations for aggregation and publication as Linked Open Data.

Conclusion

From the foregoing discussion it is clear that the academic community has a long way to go before the majority of scholarly citations, the products of their own labours, are openly available for analysis and re-use. We at OpenCitations are working to address these issues and to publish more of these missing citations. However, completion of the task will require a coordinated collaborative international effort.

Are you willing to be involved?

References

[1] B. Ian Hutchins et al. (2019). The NIH Open Citation Collection: A public access, broad coverage resource. PLoS Biol. 17 (10): e3000385. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000385

[2] B. Ian Hutchins (2021). A tipping point for open citation data. Quantitative Science Studies 2 (2): 433–437. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_c_00138

[3] Ivan Heibi, Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2019). Software review: COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. Scientometrics 121 (2): 1213-1228. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03217-6

[4] David Shotton (2013). Open citations. Nature, 502 (7471): 295-297. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/502295a

[5] Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2020). OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1): 428-444. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00023

[6] Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2019). Open Citation Identifier: Definition. Figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7127816

Cite this article as: davidshotton, "Academia’s missing references," in OpenCitations blog, 23/09/2021, https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1349.

92 million new citations added to COCI

It’s been a month since the announcement of 1.09 Billion Citations available in the July 2021 release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations.  

We’re now proud to announce the September 2021 release of COCI, which is based on open references to works with DOIs within the Crossref dump dated August 2021. This new release extends COCI with more than 92 Million additional citations, giving a total number of more than 1.18 Billion DOI-to-DOI citation links.

This latest release includes citations from the most recent articles published by the American Chemical Society, whose bibliographic references were opened in February 2021. The ACS back number citations will be available in the next COCI release, when a new processing of all the Crossref data will be completed.

You can find more information about COCI in our open-access article 

Ivan Heibi, Silvio Peroni & David Shotton (2019). Software review: COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. Scientometrics, 121 (2): 1213-1228. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03217-6  

Finally, just a reminder that the bibliographic and citation data in COCI: 

  • can be queried using the OpenCitations Indexes SPARQL endpoint; 
  • can be retrieved by using the COCI REST API
  • can be searched by using the OpenCitations Indexes Search Interface; 
  • are also available as dumps on Figshare in CSV, N-Triples, and Scholix; and 
  • can be freely re-used for any purpose. 
Cite this article as: Chiara Di Giambattista, "92 million new citations added to COCI," in OpenCitations blog, 09/09/2021, https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1322.

Reflections on the global citation graph

In his call for open citations, Dario Taraborelli hailed the scholarly citation graph (in which the nodes (vertices) are individual academic publications and the links (edges) represent bibliographic citations from one publication to another) as one of humankind’s most important intellectual achievements.

We all understand that the inclusion within our own academic publications of bibliographic references to the works of others is one of the most explicit ways of acknowledging the thoughts, discoveries, achievements and influences of other scholars, and their contributions to our own work. Not only does what we gain from their publications enable us to make intellectual progress, by “standing on the shoulders of giants” as Newton once famously observed [1], but the influence of these publications extends forward in time across the entire intellectual landscape, like gigantic shadows cast at sunset, whether or not those influenced by these publications have occasion to reference them in their own works.

A bibliographic citation is not only “a conceptual directional link from a citing entity to a cited entity, created by a human performative act of making a citation”, but it is additionally both enduring and retrospective. Enduring, because once made it persists for ever within the global corpus of scholarly literature, and retrospective because (with the exception of occasional contemporaneous citations) the cited publication predates the citing publication.

At the anterior margin of a crawling cell, cellular protrusive extension (for example of a pseudopodium) is achieved by the catalysed polymerization of new filaments of the cytoskeletal protein actin from attachment sites on an existing stationary actin filament network, pushing the cell margin forward [2]. The scholarly citation network (or citation graph, the two terms here being used interchangeably) is similarly dynamic and temporally directional, being extended forward as new works of scholarship are published. Extension of knowledge is achieved by the catalytic inspiration provided by existing academic publications, themselves temporally stationary within the expanding citation network, leading to the publication of new works of scholarship that cite these previous publications and thus extend the citation network further into the future. The citation graph is thus not just an acyclic directed graph, but an acyclic temporally directed graph. Indeed, it is this temporal aspect of the citation network that is one of its most important features.

To use another analogy, the human genealogical tree is inherently multidimensional and difficult to represent pictorially in its entirety, because each new birth brings together the family trees of the child’s two parents. However, unless the parents are seriously promiscuous, the resulting genealogical tree is not impossibly complex. In contrast, the scholarly citation network is much more highly interlinked, since each new publication cites not just two but many preceding (‘parent’) publications, which themselves may beget many other citations.

Visualization of the global scholarly citation graph, or portions of it, is thus inherently difficult, and the important temporal aspect of the graph is the one ignored by almost every method used for visualizing aspects of that graph. Existing methods may take the broad view, showing the links, and the strength of those links, between one scholarly domain and another, thus visualizing the ‘structure of science’. Alternatively, they may take a more detailed view of a small section of the graph, visualize the proximity of individual publications to one another. Often a radial display is chosen for this, that shows in closest proximity those papers directly referenced by the selected publication in the centre, then at a greater radius those papers referenced by the cited papers shown in the inner circle, and so on. Because of the graph’s complexity, such displays quickly looses intelligibility after two citation links.

Among a small number of visualization applications that do not ignore the temporal aspect of the graph is Citeology, a temporally based citation network visualization tool developed some years ago by Justin Matejka and colleagues at the design software company Autodesk [3]. Unfortunately, this innovative software prototype was not central to that company’s mission, development ceased, and the Citeology Java app is no longer available. However, in his last email to me, Justin Matejka kindly offered to help others re-create this application.

There is thus an urgent need for innovative new open-source visualization tools that will clearly and dynamically display portions of the global citation graph, for example the direct and indirect citation connections between any two publications or any two individuals, along the temporal axis of publication date. Developers within the open science community please step forward!

References

[1] Isaac Newton, in a 1675 letter to Robert Hooke, wrote “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” https://discover.hsp.org/Record/dc-9792/

[2] Bruce Alberts et al. (2014). Molecular Biology of the Cell. 6th Edition. Garland Science. Chapter 16, The Cytoskeleton.

[3] Justin Matejka, Tovi Grossman, George Fitzmaurice (2012). Citeology: Visualizing Paper Genealogy. ACM Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://www.autodesk.com/research/publications/citeology https://d2f99xq7vri1nk.cloudfront.net/CiteologyVideo.mp4

Cite this article as: davidshotton, "Reflections on the global citation graph," in OpenCitations blog, 11/08/2021, https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1289.

Crossing a significant threshold: more than one billion citations now available in COCI!

“The competitive benefits of closing access to citation data diminish with each new citation released to the public domain, but the benefits of open data remain. Going forward, citation data is almost completely public domain”.

With these words, from the article “A tipping point for open citations data” (July 15, 2021), Ian Hutchins celebrated the threshold crossing of one billion citations on public-domain databases in February 2021.

Now, a new significant milestone has been reached. We are enthusiastic to announce that COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations has just been extended with 334 million additional citations. Its most recent release, the COCI July 2021 release, now contains a total of 1.09 billion DOI-to-DOI citation links derived from open references within Crossref,which includes the references of articles deposited or opened in Crossref between November 2020 and January 2021.

These numbers make us proud, and confirm the essential value of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). Since 2018, the mission of I4OC has been to persuade publishers to provide open citation data by means of the Crossref platform. The I4OC untiring commitment has led the major academic publishers to a progressive change of heart regarding open citations, and the scholarly community to a deeper interest in this openness.

These factors contributed to the creation of COCI in 2018, the first open citation index created by OpenCitations, in which we applied the concept of citations as first-class data entities (Heibi I., Peroni S., Shotton D., 2019). Over the last three years, COCI has been extended in a series of releases, by harvesting citations mostly from Crossref data dumps, starting from an initial coverage of 300 million citations (First release).

A crucial event that preceded (and delayed!) this latest COCI release was Elsevier’s endorsement in the DORA Declaration on Research Assessment in December 2020, thereby making “reference lists for all articles published in Elsevier journals openly available via Crossref so they can be available for reuse. This means other important initiatives like I4OC can draw on this metadata”. As described in our previous post, Elsevier’s welcome commitment led to the opening of many previously closed references from its numerous academic journals submitted to Crossref. Now, after an extended period of data ingestion and processing, all these newly opened Elsevier references are available at OpenCitations within COCI.

Elsevier’s involvement has both an effective and a symbolical value. Even if publishing more than one billion citations is a thrilling achievement, and – as Hutchins wrote – we are now at a tipping point with regard to open citations data, this milestone is not the last stop. Together with the other organizations and projects that participate in the Initiative for Open Citations, we will keep claiming the urgency for the remaining academic publishers to join our cause, and sharing our values with the whole academic community to make all existing citations data freely open and accessible. Recalling what Dario Taraborelli wrote in the conclusion of his article “The citation graph is one of humankind’s most important intellectual achievements“, “the world is waiting for the citation graph to become a public good”.

Cite this article as: Chiara Di Giambattista, "Crossing a significant threshold: more than one billion citations now available in COCI!," in OpenCitations blog, 04/08/2021, https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1253.

Elsevier endorses DORA and opens its journal article reference lists

We congratulate and thank Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, for endorsing the DORA Declaration on Research Assessment (https://sfdora.org/), thereby joining the hundreds of other publishers and scientific organizations which have endorsed DORA over the previous eight years, and also for making a commitment to open the references from all its journal articles submitted to Crossref. The text of Elsevier’s endorsement, dated 16th December 2020, is to be found at https://www.elsevier.com/connect/advancing-responsible-research-assessment, and includes the statement:

“We will make reference lists for all articles published in Elsevier journals openly available via Crossref so they can be available for reuse. This means other important initiatives like I4OC can draw on this metadata.”

Particular thanks are due to Kumsal Bayazit, Elsevier’s CEO, and to Andrew Plume, head of Elsevier’s International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR), for spearheading this change in stance on the part of Elsevier, which until this week has been alone among the major scholarly publishers in keeping its reference lists at Crossref closed, for which it has attracted much criticism from the academic community.

This change of heart on the part of Elsevier now means that by next spring, after Crossref has had a chance to implement this change in status over the large corpus of Elsevier journal metadata, the reference lists of articles in the vast majority of the world’s academic journals will be open, enabling such metadata to be used to enhance publication discovery and enable transparent research assessment.  The I4OC web site and COCI, OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, will reflect this change once it has happened.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and the University of Chicago Press now stand alone as the only significant scholarly publishers who choose not to make their publication reference lists open.

Cite this article as: davidshotton, "Elsevier endorses DORA and opens its journal article reference lists," in OpenCitations blog, 20/12/2020, https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1165.

COCI has surpassed 700M citations

We are excited to share that COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, was on 12 May 2020 extended with more than 47 million additional citations, and has reached a total number of more than 702 million DOI-to-DOI citation links between more than 58 million bibliographic entities.

The citations added in this the fifth release of COCI came from the most recent Crossref dump downloaded on 22 April 2020, which includes the references of the articles deposited in Crossref between 4 October 2019 and 4 April 2020. Such updates to COCI will now occur regularly at bimonthly intervals.

As a consequence, COCI now contains 702,772,530 citations, and also includes publications about the COVID-19 pandemic. We will use this new release of COCI to update the Coronavirus Open Citations Dataset, the second release of which will include details about these additional references and publications.

COCI, which is fully described in our open-access article, was one of the subjects of a multidisciplinary comparison between the major citation indexes recently published on arXiv. In addition, it has been recently mentioned on the Scholix web site as one of the implementors of the Scholix citation data format.

Finally, we wish to remind you that all the bibliographic and citation data in COCI:

Cite this article as: Silvio Peroni, "COCI has surpassed 700M citations," in OpenCitations blog, 13/05/2020, https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1071.

OpenCitations described

OpenCitations is an infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data. We at OpenCitations are proud to announce the publication, in the first issue of Quantitative Science Studies, of a canonical paper in which we introduce and describe OpenCitations and outline its achievements and goals [1].

Here, I outline the contents of our paper, and provide definitive links on the topics described. Many of these topics have been the subjects of earlier blog posts.

This paper appears in the first Special Issue of QSS, dedicated to the description of the bibliometric data sources that lie at the heart of scientometric research, which aims to characterize the most important data sources currently available and to show how they differ in various dimensions, for instance in the data they provide, their level of openness, and their support for making research reproducible. The first three papers in this special issue cover the most important commercial bibliographic data sources: Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics), Scopus (Elsevier), and Dimensions (Digital Science), while the remaining three articles describe open data sources: Microsoft Academic, Crossref and OpenCitations.

In the introduction to our own paper, we describe the origins of OpenCitations, discuss the growth and benefits of open science, and introduce the Semantic Web techniques used at OpenCitations for recording and publishing our data. We then go on to describe OpenCitations’ services and data, namely Open Citation Identifiers, the OpenCitations Data Model, the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies, the OpenCitations Corpus, and the OpenCitations Indexes of citation data, of which the first and largest is COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, that currently holds information on over 624 million citations. We conclude our survey of OpenCitations’ services and data by outlining the generic open source software developed at OpenCitations, including OSCAR, the OpenCitations RDF Search Application for searching over RDF datasets, LUCINDA, OSCAR’s associated OpenCitations RDF Resource Browser, and RAMOSE, OpenCitations’ application for creating REST APIs over SPARQL endpoints, thus opening Semantic Web datasets to those not familiar with SPARQL, the RDF query language.

In the second half of the paper, we describe OpenCitations as an organization in terms of its compliance with the principles for the sustainability of open infrastructures proposed by Bilder, Lin and Neylon (2015) [2], and report the selection of OpenCitations by the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) as an open infrastructure organization worthy of crowd-funding support by the stakeholder community. We then provide usage statistics for our datasets and web site, and describe the adoption of OpenCitations data and services by the community, before concluding with a forward look at our proposed developments of OpenCitations activities.

References

[1] Silvio Peroni and David Shotton (2020). OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship. Quantitative Science Studies 1 (1): 428-444. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00023

[2] Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin and Cameron Neylon (2015). Principles for open scholarly infrastructures. Figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859

Cite this article as: davidshotton, "OpenCitations described," in OpenCitations blog, 26/02/2020, https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1047.

The first issue of Quantitative Science Studies

The memorable date 20/02/2020 saw the publication by MIT Press of the first issue of Volume One of a new journal, Quantitative Science Studies (QSS), the official open access journal of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). QSS’s Editor in Chief is Ludo Waltman (CWTS, University of Leiden, Netherlands), Vincent Larivière (Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada) and Staša Milojević (Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, Indiana, USA) are its Associate Editors, and it has a large and distinguished editorial board.

What makes the launch of this new journal remarkable is the story of how it came into being. In 2019, the entire editorial team of the Journal of Informetrics (JOI), a leading journal in this field published by Elsevier, resigned en masse and decided to start an alternative journal, QSS, both because of Elsevier’s position on open citations, and because, in their opinion, the financial model used by Elsevier violates the scientific ethos.

Reproducibility in the field of scientometrics requires scientific metadata that are both of high-quality and open, particularly those relating to bibliographic citations. The JOI editorial board was deeply concerned by the refusal of Elsevier to join almost all other large scholarly publishers in supporting the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). As we have previously reported on this blog, Elsevier is the largest contributor of bibliographic references to Crossref, but insists that these data should be kept closed.

Elsevier’s position, driven by commercial interests (since it sells access to citation data through Scopus), flies in the face of the scientific community’s clear move towards open science, with hundreds of scientometricians having signed an ISSI open letter urging scholarly publishers to support I4OC.

Science is a self-governing system, and the editorial team held the view that the ultimate responsibility for a scholarly journal should fall with the scientific community, who serve as the gatekeepers, producers, and consumers of scientific content.

The editorial team also believed Elsevier’s subscription fees to be excessive, and its article processing charges (APCs) for open access publishing to be unfairly high, thus limiting both those who can afford to read Elsevier journals and those who can afford to publish in them, so that publishing with Elsevier inevitably places major limits on scholarship, harming both science and society. It was for all these reasons that they forsook JOI and started QSS.

We at OpenCitations congratulate the editorial team for their courage in deciding to make this journal flip, and wish them, together with the ISSI and MIT Press, every success for this important new journal. We also commend the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and the Communication, Information, Media Centre (KIM) of the University of Konstanz, who, in collaboration with the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), have generously agreed to cover APCs for the first three years of the QSS journal.

Cite this article as: davidshotton, "The first issue of Quantitative Science Studies," in OpenCitations blog, 26/02/2020, https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1541.

Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search