We’re happy to announcePOCI, the OpenCitations Index of PubMed open PMID-to-PMID citations, an RDF dataset containing details of all the citations from publications bearing PubMed Identifiers (PMIDs) to other PMID-identified publications, harvested from the National Institutes of Health Open Citations Collection (NIH-OCC). The citations available in POCI are treated as first-class data entities, with accompanying properties including the citations timespan, modelled according to the OpenCitations Data Model.
Each citation (i.e. an individual of the class cito:Citation) is identified by an URL structured as follows:
https://w3id.org/oc/index/poci/ci/[[OCI]].
Open Citation Identifiers
Each Open Citation Identifier [[OCI]] has a simple structure: the lower-case letters “oci” followed by a colon, followed by two numbers separated by a dash (e.g. https://w3id.org/oc/index/poci/ci/01600102060800080706-016002060909030401), in which the first number identifies the citing work and the second number identifies the cited work.
For citations in which the citing and cited works are identified by PMIDs, which includes all the POCI citations, the OCI is created in the following manner, as explained more fully here. Each converted numeral part of OCI is prefixed by a 0160, which indicates that NIH is the supplier of the original metadata of the citation (as indicated at http://opencitations.net/oci).
are available as dumps on Figshare in CSV, N-Triples and Scholix.
What is an Open Citation Index?
A citation index is a bibliographic index recording citations between publications, allowing the user to establish which later documents cite earlier documents. The current indexes available in OpenCitations are:
This blog post is the first of a series dedicated to the description and promotion of OpenCitations Meta.
In addition to OpenCitations’ Citation Indexes, OpenCitations is pleased to announce a new service: OpenCitations Meta, a database which stores and delivers bibliographic metadata for all publications involved in the OpenCitations citation indexes.
For each publication, the metadata exposed by OpenCitations Meta includes the publication’s title, type, venue (e.g. journal name), volume number, issue number, page numbers, publication date, and identifiers such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and PubMed Identifiers (PMIDs). In addition, OpenCitations Meta includes details of the main actors involved in the publication of the document, i.e., the names of the authors, editor, and publisher, each with its own additional metadata and identifier (e.g. ORCID).
Why OpenCitations Meta?
OpenCitations Meta represents a major infrastructural advance for OpenCitations, since it addresses and overcomes some of the limitations previously experienced, providing three major benefits:
1. It permits OpenCitations to respond more quickly to user requests for information.
The OpenCitations Citation Indexes contain citation-related metadata, such as the identifiers for the citing and cited publications, the citation timespan, and other citation-specific metadata, for example whether or not the citation is a self-citation. However, metadata for the citing and cited publications were hitherto not stored by OpenCitations, but rather obtained by on-the-fly API calls to external services such as Crossref, Datacite and ORCID. This dependence on responses from external services significantly slowed the delivery of the required information to users. Since OpenCitations Meta stores in-house the same bibliographic metadata for the citing and cited publications as was previously obtained by those external API calls, the former temporal limitation is now alleviated, thereby accelerating response times for requests made to the OpenCitations REST API services, and thus better supporting our users.
2. It permits OpenCitations to index citations involving publications that lack DOIs.
The second problem that OpenCitations Meta addresses goes beyond the OpenCitations infrastructure and addresses a more general issue of digital publishing, particularly in the Humanities, namely that many scholarly publications lack persistent identifiers such as DOIs and PMIDs. The citations indexed by OpenCitations are themselves treated as first-class data entities, each bearing a unique persistent Open Citation Identifier. According to the Open Citation Identifier definition [1], the entities linked by an indexed citation need to be identified by a persistent identifier (PID) from a recognised scheme such as the Digital Object Identifier scheme. For example, COCI [2] records the DOIs of the citing and cited entities. However, the association of DOIs with published documents is not uniformly spread across all scholarly fields. Indeed, in Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection, only 50% of the current publications in the Art and Humanities are associated with a DOI [3]. In addition, in many fields, particularly in the Humanities, references are required to pre-digital historical primary sources that lack PIDs. OpenCitations Meta solves this problem by assigning a unique OpenCitations Meta Identifier (OMID) to each document. In this way, it can record the metadata of publications lacking an external identifier and store the citations involving them in one of the OpenCitations Indexes.
3. Use of the OpenCitations Meta Identifier permits de-duplication of records of bibliographic resources having more than one external identifier, such as a DOI and a PMID.
While many scholarly publications lack external PIDs, many others will have more than one external PID, for example a DOI for the record of that publication in Crossref, and a PMID for the record of that same publication in PubMed. This is perfectly legitimate. Since OpenCitations Meta assigns a unique OpenCitations Meta Identifier (OMID) to every entry, and in addition records all external identifiers already assigned to that publication, for example its DOI and its PMID, this permits the automatic de-duplication of such publications within OpenCitations Meta.
The data model
OpenCitations uses Semantic Web technologies to encode all its data, including the bibliographic metadata now stored in OpenCitations Meta. For this purpose, the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM) [4] uses classes and properties defined in the SPAR Ontologies to represent:
bibliographic entities (fabio:Expression), e.g. a journal article
identifiers (datacite:Identifier), e.g. a DOI
agent roles (pro:RoleInTime), e.g. an author
responsible agents (foaf:Agent), e.g. a person
publication format details (fabio:Manifestation), e.g. first and last pages
Figure 1 depicts relationships between some of the various entities.
Figure 1. A small subset of the OCDM used in OC Meta. Yellow rectangles represent classes, green polygons represent data types, while blue and green arrows represent object properties and data properties, respectively
In addition to storing data, great importance is given to recording provenance and change-tracking of OpenCitations Meta entries, including the agent who processed a specific entity, i.e. creating, deleting, modifying or merging it, the date and time on which this action was performed, and the primary source of the data.
The data
At the release date, 20th December 2022, OpenCitations Meta is using Crossref as its primary source, with the purpose of hosting the metadata describing all citing and cited publications involved in the 1,392,036,835 citations within COCI [2]. From a quantitative point of view, OpenCitations Meta presently contains metadata describing 87,321,593 bibliographic entities, 277,750,235 authors, 2,359,301 editors, 17,268 publishers, and 710,226 publication venues (e.g. journal names). Editors and authors have been counted by their roles, without at this stage disambiguating individuals with the same name. Conversely, bibliographic entities, publishers, and publication venues were counted by their OMIDs. In total, the OpenCitations Meta triplestore presently contains 3,298,335,581 triples.
In the following days, OpenCitations Meta will be expanded to include bibliographic metadata for all citing and cited publications involved in the 169,822,752 citations from DataCite within DOCI, released on 13th December 2022.
Table 1 lists the various types of bibliographic resource represented in OpenCitations Meta. The current dataset contains mostly journal articles (60,683,841), which exceed the number of book chapters (6,288,351) by about ten times and the number of conference proceedings articles (4,917,568) by about twelve times.
OpenCitations Meta allows the users to explore the contained metadata either via SPARQL (https://opencitations.net/meta/sparql) or via the OpenCitations Meta REST API (https://opencitations.net/meta/api/v1). In particular, the API will retrieve a list of bibliographic resources and related metadata starting from one or more identifiers including an OpenCitations Meta Identifier (OMID), an author’s ORCID, or an editor’s ORCID.
Finally, all the metadata and provenance information present in OpenCitations Meta are available as dumps in RDF (JSON-LD) or CSV format under a CC0 licence. Every time a citation index is updated, we will update OpenCitations Meta.
Conclusion
OpenCitations Meta makes search operations on the metadata of scholarly publications involved in the citations indexed in the OpenCitations Citation Indexes faster, since the metadata are now held in-house. The use of OpenCitations Meta Identifiers (OMIDs) permits OpenCitations Meta to act as a mapping hub to disambiguate and unify information on single publications identified by more than one external identifier, and makes it possible to characterise citations involving resources lacking an external identifier.
In the future, we will introduce a new API operation to perform text searches. Moreover, OpenCitations Meta will incorporate metadata from other sources in addition to Crossref. As mentioned above, work is already under way to ingest bibliographic metadata from Datacite for the publications involved in the citations newly indexed in DOCI. This will soon be followed with similar OpenCitations Meta entries relating to a new citation index, POCI, containing citations from PubMed, to be released later this year. PubMed metadata will be made available by February 2023.
Heibi, I., Peroni, S. & Shotton, D. Software review: COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. Scientometrics 121, 1213–1228 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03217-6
Gorraiz, J., Melero-Fuentes, D., Gumpenberger, C., & Valderrama-Zurián, J.-C. (2016). Availability of digital object identifiers (DOIs) in Web of Science and Scopus. Journal of Informetrics, 10 (1), 98–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2015.11.008
We’re excited to introduce DOCI, the OpenCitations Index of Datacite open DOI-to-DOI citations, a new tool containing citations derived from publications bearing DataCite DOIs to other DOI-identified publications, harvested from DataCite. The citations available in DOCI are treated as first-class data entities, with accompanying properties including the citations timespan, modelled according to the OpenCitations Data Model.
For citations in which the citing and cited works are identified by DOIs, which includes all the DOCI citations, the OCI is created in the following manner, as explained more fully here. Each case-insensitive DOI is first normalized to lower case letters. Then, after omitting the initial doi:10. prefix, the alphanumeric string of the DOI is converted reversibly to a pure numerical string using the simple two-numeral lookup table for numerals, lower case letters and other characters presented at https://github.com/opencitations/oci/blob/master/lookup.csv. Finally, each converted numeral is prefixes by a 080, which indicates that DataCite is the supplier of the original metadata of the citation (as indicated at http://opencitations.net/oci).
A citation index is a bibliographic index recording citations between publications, allowing the user to establish which later documents cite earlier documents. The current indexes available in OpenCitations are:
OpenCitations has happily joined the open-source social media platform joinmastodon.org.
Mastodon is “a free and open-source software developed by a non-profit organization”, with the aim of favouring interoperability and bringing social media interaction “back in the hands of the people”.
We look forward to recreating there our wide network of connections, and getting in touch with new people, projects and institutions in a different virtual environment.
Blog post by Ivan Heibi (Universiy of Bologna) and Arcangelo Massari (University of Bologna).
OpenCitations publishes the COCI dataset after each new release in three main formats: CSV, N-Triples, and Scholix (see https://opencitations.net/download#coci). The CSV format is the most popular and downloaded one due to its comprehensive data organization (i.e. tabular format) and smaller size (compared to the other formats provided). Therefore, this is also the format we suggest using for a local process of the entire COCI dataset.
The CSV dumps of COCI are uploaded on Figshare. You can check and download the last dump released from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6741422. The dump consists of one main ZIP file, including other smaller ZIP archives (one for each release) containing the actual CSV files (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The contents of the COCI CSV dataset (after the August 2022 release)
It is possible to process this data without unzipping the internal archives, thus saving a lot of disk space. In this tutorial, we will see how to achieve this in Python. Same process could be done in other programming languages.
Processing the COCI dump using Python
Step 1) Downloading the COCI dump
First, you need to download the last CSV dump release of COCI from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6741422 and decompress only the external archive. After this operation, you should have a folder containing the internal ZIP files such as in Figure 1.
Note: It is beneficial to decompress the external archive because doing so does not increase the space occupied on the disk (compressing archives results in a compression rate of 0%) and because working on nested archives would significantly increase RAM requirements.
Step 2) Working with the ZIP files
Python provides the built-in zipfile module, whose ZipFile class allows you to create, read, write, edit and list the contents of a ZIP file. Given as input the path of the root directory containing all the ZIP files (FOLDER_PATH), the process elaborates each of these files on a different iteration. Each cycle initializes a ZipFile object by specifying the path to the ZIP file (archive_path).
from zipfile import ZipFile
import os
for archive_name in os.listdir(FOLDER_PATH): archive_path = os.path.join(FOLDER_PATH, archive_name) with ZipFile(archive_path) as archive:
# ...
Step 3) Accessing the ZIP files
Use the namelist() method to return the list of CSV files contained in each archive. Then to open the inner CSV files, simply cycle through the list of names and feed them to the open() method of the ZipFile instance, i.e. archive in the example below.
from zipfile import ZipFile
import os
for archive_name in os.listdir(FOLDER_PATH):
archive_path = os.path.join(FOLDER_PATH, archive_name)
with ZipFile(archive_path) as archive:
for csv_name in archive.namelist(): with archive.open(csv_name) as csv_file:
# ...
Step 4) Reading the CSVs
The .open() method returns a buffer. To read the CSV file as a list of dictionaries (i.e. represent each row of the CSV in dictionary format, e.g., {“column1″:”val1”, “column2″:”val2”}) we need to transform the buffer using the TextIOWrapper class and read it using the DictReader class of csv. Then we convert the result of DictReader into a list.
from io import TextIOWrapper
from zipfile import ZipFile
import os
for archive_name in os.listdir(FOLDER_PATH):
archive_path = os.path.join(FOLDER_PATH, archive_name)
with ZipFile(archive_path) as archive:
for csv_name in archive.namelist(): with archive.open(csv_name) as csv_file: reader = csv.DictReader(io.TextIOWrapper(csv_file)) rows = list(reader) # ...
Step 5) Processing the CSVs content
Now you can go through each row of the list and process the citation data as you want. The following example prints the citing and cited entity of each citation in the dump.
from io import TextIOWrapper
from zipfile import ZipFile
import os
for archive_name in os.listdir(FOLDER_PATH):
archive_path = os.path.join(FOLDER_PATH, archive_name)
with ZipFile(archive_path) as archive:
for csv_name in archive.namelist(): with archive.open(csv_name) as csv_file: reader = csv.DictReader(io.TextIOWrapper(csv_file)) rows = list(reader) # Process the CSV here for r in rows: print("Citing entity:",r["citing"]) print("Cited entity:",r["cited"])
Since its inauguration in 2010, OpenCitations has always granted free access to its services to users throughout the world, with no requirement for registration or sign-up. Programmatic access to OpenCitations data can be obtained either via our SPARQL endpoints and our REST APIs. In addition, OpenCitations data – available in CSV, Scholix, and RDF formats – can be downloaded from data dumps made periodically and stored on Figshare, so as to enable large-scale analyses using the whole content of the data sets, and also be obtained via our user-friendly text-based search and browsing interfaces.
One of OpenCitations’ priorities is (and will always be) to keep its data globally open and available at zero cost and without restriction for third-party analysis and re-use. As a matter of sustainability, OpenCitations relies on financial support from the scholarly community, which includes those institutions that use OpenCitations data. However, OpenCitations has not so far had in place a proper system to monitor its users, and the main evidence of the impact of OpenCitations in different academic fields and countries has been incompletely obtained from direct contacts with our members and donors across the world, our collaborations with international projects, and the interactions on our social platforms (Twitter and LinkedIn).
We would now like to institute a system that enables us to follow the usage and assess the impact of OpenCitations more reliably. For this purpose, we are now happy to announce the launch of the OpenCitations Access Token System for access to the OpenCitations data and services.
An OpenCitations Access Token is an opaque character string that anonymously identifies a unique user of the OpenCitations APIs. OpenCitations assigns an access token only if authorized to do so by each user, who can request a token by inserting his/her email address into the access form and clicking “Get token”. Upon submission of such a request, each user will automatically receive a personal access token by email. Users can save their personal access token and reuse it every time calling the APIs of OpenCitations, by passing it as a value for the key access-token in the header of each API call.
Obtaining and using an OpenCitations Access Token is thus easy. It only requires a simple form request, and then the insertion of your personal token into the API call header when using OpenCitations REST APIs. OpenCitations will not store users’ email addresses or any personal information, so that the users’ privacy will be totally safeguarded. The token system just provides a simple mechanism for identifying unique users, for which the use of IP addresses is insufficient.
Obtaining an OpenCitations Access Token will take the user only a few seconds and needs to happen only once. You can request your OpenCitations Access Token here:
Use of an OpenCitations Access Token is not compulsory. However, token use will help OpenCitations incredibly, by enabling us to monitor the number of the unique users accessing our data and services, providing objective anonymized evidence of the number of institutions and researchers accessing our data either occasionally or on a regular basis, which we can then employ to demonstrate the usefulness of OpenCitations in the research environment. While the token system will initially be employed just for API calls (the most used service we offer), it will subsequently be extended to our other forms of data access.
OpenCitations exists for the people that use its data for research purposes every day, and thanks to their support. This is why obtaining precise knowledge of how many researchers and institutions are accessing our services is essential to us, since it will enable us to present the uniqueness and value of OpenCitations to new communities of stakeholders, and thus to make it possible to enlarge the already enthusiastic and diverse group of people and institutions supporting and using our Open Science Infrastructure.
To summarize: Getting and using an OpenCitations Access Token is voluntary, easy, and does not cost you anything. However, it will help OpenCitations a great deal. Please get your own token now, and use it next time you access OpenCitations. Thank you very much!
We announce the August 2022 release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, which is based on open references to works with DOIs within the Crossref dump dated August 2022. This new release extends COCI with more than 48 million additional citations, giving a total number of more than 1.36 billion DOI-to-DOI citation links.
This release includes citations from the articles published over the last four years by IEEE, whose bibliographic references were opened in June 2022.
A fundamental role in pushing the commercial publishers to open their citation data was played by Crossref’s recent announcement to change its reference distribution policy, by making all its metadata open.
Besides IEEE, COCI already includes the citation data derived from Elsevier (open via Crossref since December 2020) and from the last articles published by the American Chemical Society (whose references were opened in February 2021)
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;
Posted on August 10th 2022 by Chiara Di Giambattista
More than a year ago, Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member & Community Outreach for Crossref, and a valued member of the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, published on the Crossref blog the post “The road ahead: our strategy through 2025”. In order to describe all Crossref’s principles and activities, Ginny presented the Crossref strategic planning framework as a diagram summarizing Crossref’s statements, key messages and truths. The clarity and immediacy of the diagram were such that we adapted it to present OpenCitations’ own statements and goals. The resulting poster “OpenCitations – what does the future hold?” was presented by our Director David Shotton at the OASPA2021 conference, and can be found in this blog post.
Although the poster offered a wide overview of OpenCitations values, unique traits, benefits and plans, it differed slightly from Ginny’s original diagram, in particular because it lacked a “Mission Statement”, scattering the relevant information within the “Values” and “Principles” boxes. Indeed, at that time (September 2021), we didn’t have a clearly defined Mission Statement.
Nevertheless, the creation of that poster was crucial in helping us start to articulate more clearly the purpose and meaning of OpenCitations. As David underlined in his post “From little acorns…a retrospective on OpenCitations”, since 2018 OpenCitations activities have progressively increased and, with them, the number of related journal articles, conference papers and technical definitions. OpenCitations’ involvement in international networks and collaborations (such as SCOSS and the OpenAIRE-Nexus project), together with our need of identifying and reaching out to new stakeholders to assure OpenCitations’ development and sustainability, has made it necessary to publicly define OpenCitations’ mission, unique strengths and next developmental steps.
After numerous revisions, aided by wise advice from members of the OpenCitations Advisory Board members, we’re now happy to publish the following three OpenCitations documents:
which together provide a summary of why we exist and where we are heading.
We are particularly proud of the definition of OpenCitations’ primary mission, namely
“to harvest and openly publish accurate and comprehensive metadata describing the world’s academic publications and the scholarly citations that link them, and to preserve ongoing access to this information by secure archiving.”
The Mission Statement also presents brief descriptions of the OpenCitations context, our vision, our value proposition and our relationship with the community and stakeholders.
The Uniqueness of OpenCitations provides the answer to the question ‘Why choose to use OpenCitations?’, and is a detailed presentation of OpenCitations’ benefits.
OpenCitations – Present Status and Future Plans summarizes OpenCitations’ ongoing activities, that can be quickly visualized on our public roadmap. It also introduces the OpenCitations Working Groups, served by the members of the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, which are currently working on the themes of governance evolution and community building, with the common purpose of driving OpenCitations along the path from being a ‘sustainable infrastructure’ (in POSI terms) to being an enduring community led andfinancially sustained infrastructure.
In fulfilling our mission and reaching our goals, the support and vital interest of our community members is fundamental. We request that you, as a member of our community, provide us with feedback on these documents and the ideas they contain, or indeed to ask for clarifications, to help us improving our mission and our communications to explain it. You can reach us here: contact@opencitations.net.
2021 is just behind us. Since January is “the Monday of the months”, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote[1], it’s a good time to take stock of what happened at OpenCitations during the past year.
Among the numerous events, achievements and challenges that 2021 brought with it, we want to highlight five milestones which make us proud to look back:
1. We extended our coverage to well over one billion citations
During 2021, OpenCitations’ largest index COCI (the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations) was able to include for the first time the citation links involving references that had been opened at Crossref by Elsevier and the American Chemical Society, thereby greatly expanding its coverage. The last release of COCI (November 2021) is based on open references to works with DOIs within the Crossref dump dated October 2021, and, as a result, COCI now contains information on more than 1.23 billion citations involving almost 70 million publications. A recent analysis by Alberto Martìn-Martìn (Facultad de Comunicación y Documentación, Universidad de Granada, Spain), published on the OpenCitations Blog in October, shows that the citation coverage provided by OpenCitations is approaching parity with that of the leading commercial citation indexes, Web of Science and Scopus, offering a viable alternative upon which to base open and reproducible metrics of academic performance.
2. OpenCitations team grew
Last summer, we appointed Claudio Fabbri as our Administrator and Research Manager to take responsibility for the day-to-day administrative and financial activities of OpenCitations; Chiara Di Giambattista as Communications Director and Community Development Manager to take care of all communications and community interactions made on behalf of OpenCitations; and Giuseppe Grieco as our new Software and Systems Developer to take charge of technical development related to the OpenCitations services.
Thanks to the support from the OpenAIRE Nexus project, the team has also recently welcomed Arcangelo Massari as our new Software Developer to take care of the development of the new database OpenCitations Meta. We anticipate further appointments during 2022!
Our International Advisory Board met in November, and we thank its members for the valuable advice they provided. The Board will meet again later this month.
3. We participated in many international meetings
During the past year, OpenCitations’ directors Silvio Peroni and David Shotton took part in numerous international conferences, webinars and workshops, including the LIBER Annual Conference 2021, the OS Fair 2021, OASPA 2021 and FORCE2021. These provided excellent opportunities to describe and promote OpenCitations, to reach out to new potential stakeholders, and to discuss with other experts the main themes of our activities and plans as they relate to Open Science.
The year ended with a bang, with the announcement during the closing session of FORCE2021 that the 2021 Open Publishing Award for Open Data had been awarded to OpenCitations.
4. We received a world of support
In 2021, thanks to our involvement in the SCOSS funding campaign and to our commitment to reaching out to the libraries and universities potentially interested in OpenCitations, we gathereda wide international community of stakeholders and supporters around us. We are deeply thankful to the 6 consortia and 56 institutions across the globe which are now supporting us financially, thus making it possible for us to enhance our services and expand our team. You can find the full list of our supporters on the OpenCitations website and in this recent Thank You video:
Additionally, in January 2021, we started our involvement in the EC-funded OpenAIRE Nexus project, bringing us into closer collaboration with our European colleagues and infrastructures, including OpenAIRE. The main aim of the project is to create a framework of services for assisting in publishing research, monitoring its impact, helping promote its discovery, and integrating it into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) “for the benefit of the open science community worldwide”. In OpenCitations, we’re thrilled to be part of this collaborative project by providing open bibliographic citations as part of the open data components of OpenAIRE and the EOSC.
5. We set the stage for future developments
Thanks to the research grants and the support and endorsement we have received from the international scholarly community, we are now working on a variety of new services, thus setting our goals for the coming years. In particular, we want to enhance OpenCitations partnerships and dialogue with the scholarly community; to collaborate with colleagues to develop new services that will expand our citation coverage, including new OpenCitations indexes of NIH-OCC, of DataCite and of other sources of open references, that will all be searchable through a single API; and to create OpenCitations Meta, our new database that will hold comprehensive bibliographic metadata of the publications involved in our indexes citations, thereby enabling faster query responses and the ability to host citations involving publications lacking DOIs[2].
“What role does ‘open’ play in making this project special?”
This apparently easy, but not banal, question was asked in the Open Publishing Awards nomination form, and at OpenCitations we prefaced our answer to it by stating “For OpenCitations, ‘open’ is the crucial value and the final purpose.” We consider the free availability of bibliographic citation data to be a necessary condition for the establishment of an open knowledge graph, and believe that having citations open helps achieve a more transparent, accessible and comprehensive research practice.
Since 2019, the Open Publishing Awards, founded and organized by the Coko Foundation and sponsored by OASPA, Crossref and Cloud68.Co, “celebrate software and content in publishing that use open licenses but also, importantly, provide a chance to reflect on the strategic value of openness”. The award judges considered open access projects divided into five categories: Open Publishing Lifetime Contribution, Open Content, Open Publishing Models, Open Source Software and Open Data.
It is in this final Open Data category of the Open Publishing Awardsthat OpenCitations was selected, as an infrastructure that perfectly represents the open principles, from among the few semantic web and linked open data initiatives currently available in the scholarly communication landscape. The award was announced in the Open Publishing Awards Ceremony, during the closing session of the FORCE2021 conference “Joining Forces to Advance the Future of Research Communication” (7-9 December). You can learn more about the Awards and the other projects selected here: https://openpublishingawards.org/results/2021/index.html
The greatest honour for OpenCitations was receiving the following comment given on behalf of the jury panel, which included open source and scholarly communication experts:
“At the time of writing this review, the largest database provided by OpenCitations contains more than 1.23 billion citations. Compiling this database in a license-friendly way is a feat on its own, but combine that with OpenCitations’ persistence (established 11 years ago), their active and consistent involvement with the community, and the number of works that were made possible by their effort (Google Scholar lists 1440 results), it is clear that OpenCitations is one of the fundamental projects in open publishing, specifically in open scientific publishing”.
We are proud and humbled to count the Open Publishing Award in Open Data among the acknowledgements so far received by OpenCitations. Despite the term “award”, the Open Publishing Awards, in fact, don’t aim to proclaim winners, but rather to “shake the hands” of some projects which seem to be following (and tracing) a right path towards a more open knowledge. All the projects awarded help by defining more concretely what “open”means, and at the same time their example encourages awareness on the variety of the open publishing projects, and a reflection about the common values and goals that gather so many different people, institutions and organizations.
Recognizing the commitment to the openness of knowledge and research of the not-for-profit and collaborative projects like OpenCitations is about community, not competition.
As Silvio recently stated:
“OpenCitations is a plural. Together, we are OpenCitations.”
