Job – OpenCitations blog

OpenCitations is hiring: one-year Research Fellow position now open

OpenCitations is seeking applicants for a one-year Research Fellow position to be held from April 2023, for which the application closing deadline is 28 February 2023.

Currently, the amount and complexity of the data made available by OpenCitations opens up several issues related to the improvement, scalability and optimisation of its infrastructure. Therefore, it is crucial to study and customise recent approaches for managing Big Data to create a knowledge base to build decentralised, scalable, long-lasting and easily-customizable services.

The goal of the Research Fellowship is

to study the current limitations and possible improvements to introduce in the OpenCitations infrastructure
to reengineer the current infrastructure to make it more scalable, reliable, interoperable, reusable and distributed.

Thus, the Research Fellow is expected to address issues related to the provision of Web services, the management of distributed and heterogeneous databases and services, data conversion and ingestion processes, parallel computing and security. Particular attention will be given to data preservation and the long-term maintenance and update of the infrastructure.

Requirements

The minimal formal requirement for this position is a Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Science and Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering, Digital Humanities or equivalent.

Moreover, applicants are expected to have

sysadmin skills
computer programming skills
the ability to read, write and speak in good English

It is highly desirable for the applicants to have

demonstrable expertise in using and managing Linux servers (especially Debian and Raspbian), container orchestrator systems (e.g. Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code systems (e.g. Terraform), Web servers implementing FastGCI (especially lighttpd), graph databases (especially Blazegraph), Python programming and Python Web Application Frameworks (especially web.py and Flask), Git-based version-control systems (especially GitHub);
a strong and demonstrable commitment to open science
demonstrable knowledge of Semantic Web technologies, Linked Data and Web technologies

Teamwork abilities and a good knowledge of Italian would also be very beneficial.

How to apply

The Research Fellowship application (written either in Italian or in English) should minimally comprise the following:

a cover letter of application, motivating why the candidate is applying for this position;
a full Curriculum Vitae containing information about prior scientific and professional jobs and the scientific production of the candidate;
a public portfolio of software, projects and activities undertaken within the past ten years, with a clear indication of the applicant’s role in each.

The Call for Applications (in Italian and in English) is available online on the website of the University of Bologna. It also includes an attachment with a description of OpenCitations and of the activities related to the position. The position has a net salary (exempt from income tax, after deduction of social security contributions) in excess of 23K euros per year. As indicated in the Call for Applications, candidates need to apply exclusively through the University of Bologna web portal.

The OpenCitations team is growing – announcing three new appointments!

This is a summer of great news for OpenCitations. Thanks to the generous support received from the scholarly community during the first year of SCOSS adoption, we’re happy to announce the appointment of three new colleagues to work for OpenCitations at the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata (University of Bologna).

Here’s some information about their backgrounds, positions and roles at OpenCitations.

Claudio Fabbri (Administrator and Research Manager):

Claudio has taken responsibility for all the day-to-day administrative activities of OpenCitations, including financial arrangements with those organisations supporting OpenCitations and bureaucratic interactions involving our host institution, the University of Bologna.

“After graduating in philosophy, I worked for several years as a librarian in university libraries. Considering my professional background, it came naturally to me to get in touch first with the Open Access movement and then, in a broader view, with Open Science principles. Now, as the Research Manager for OpenCitations, I’m proud to lead the administrative work for this great infrastructure. I’m interested in the history of science, especially how scientific communication has changed over the years”.

Chiara Di Giambattista (Communications Director and Community Development Manager):

Chiara takes care of all communications and social interactions made on behalf of OpenCitations, in terms of outreach to the scholarly community, contacts with present and potential supporting organisations, and OpenCitations’ communications via social media. She is developing a comprehensive mission statement and communications strategy for OpenCitations, designed to enhance the community’s understanding of OpenCitations’ global mission and awareness of its financial needs, to increase usage of OpenCitations services, and to foster collaborative interactions with like-minded infrastructures and institutions.

“I graduated in Visual Arts at the University of Bologna with the thesis “Presenting the future in the Digital Age. The semiotic convergence between art and IxD design in the practice of Future Casting”. Being deeply passionate about the adaptive potential of language in all its forms, from classical linguistics to visual semiotics, I have various experiences in web journalism and publishing. My role in OpenCitations is to improve the engagement of OpenCitations with the scholarly community, to develop OpenCitations’ social media platforms (LinkedIn and Twitter) and the OpenCitations blog, and to communicate and promote the values, services and impact of OpenCitations throughout the world”.

Giuseppe Grieco (Software and Systems Developer):

As a skilled computer scientist, Giuseppe will take charge of all the technical development related to the OpenCitations services, data acquisition, and bibliographic metadata and citations provision.

“I have a degree in computer science. I have been passionate about this field since I was thirteen years old, when I started to learn the basics of algorithms and programming. Most recently, I have been dedicating myself to artificial intelligence by pursuing Masters studies at the University of Pisa. I have always tried to take every opportunity to put into practice what I’ve been studying . Now, with my appointment at OpenCitations, I will do so by developing upgrades and enhancements to the existing software infrastructure”.

More new people will be getting involved in OpenCitations in the autumn. Watch this space!

New research fellowship position to work on the EOSC

OpenAIRE-Nexus is an H2020 project funded by the European Commission which aims at bringing together, within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), fourteen new services focused on the development and promotion of Open Science. OpenCitations is directly involved in this project through the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna.

In the context of this OpenAIRE-Nexus project, our goal is to make all services offered by OpenCitations compatible with OpenAIRE, so as to guarantee semantic and technical interoperability with all the other Open Science services available in the EOSC. For this purpose, we now seek applicants for a new one-year research fellowship to be held from May 2021 (renewable for an additional year), for which the application closing deadline is 31 March 2021.

The goal of the Research Fellowship is to study the current limitations of the OpenCitations infrastructure, and possible improvements to introduce into it, in order to integrate it with OpenAIRE and the EOSC. The Research Fellow, who will work in collaboration with Silvio Peroni, Director of OpenCitations, is expected to address issues relating to the provision of Web services, the management of distributed and heterogeneous databases, and data ingestion and conversion processes.

The Call for Applications (in Italian and in English) is available online on the website of the University of Bologna. It also includes an attachment with a description of OpenCitations and of the activities related to the position. The position has a net salary (exempt from income tax, after deduction of social security contributions) in excess of 20K euros per year. As indicated in the Call for Applications, candidates need to apply exclusively through the University of Bologna web portal.

For further information, please contact Silvio Peroni (email: silvio dot peroni at unibo dot it).

Seeking applicants for three-year research fellowship position

A year ago, at the end of 2019, OpenCitations was selected by the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS, https://scoss.org) for its second round of crowdfunding support, since SCOSS believes that OpenCitations aligns well with Open Science goals and is an innovative service. The goal of such support is to enable OpenCitations’ operations over the next three years as it transitions into a global scholarly infrastructure organization with a secure financial footing. As part of this work, we now plan to strengthen the current technical and computational infrastructure (server, parallel processing, backup, etc.) used by OpenCitations, which is currently hosted at the University of Bologna.

For this purpose, we now seek applicants for a new three-year research fellowship to be held from March 2021, for which the application closing deadline is 7 February 2021. The principal goals of this research fellowship are:

to study the current limitations of the OpenCitations infrastructure and introduce improvements, and
to design and implement new software control tools that will enable us to manage the infrastructure more efficiently.

Additionally, the selected research fellow will be expected to address issues relating to the provision of Web services, the management of distributed and heterogeneous databases, OpenCitations’ data conversion and ingestion processes involving parallel computing, and the overall security of the infrastructure. Particular attention will need to be given to data preservation and to the long-term maintenance and updating of the infrastructure.