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OpenCitations needs you: support the change in research practices

In OpenCitations, we like to define our infrastructure organization as “community-based” and “community-driven”, and we really mean it. The support coming from the number of academic libraries and consortia coming after OpenCitations’ involvement in the 2nd SCOSS funding cycle has made it possible, starting from 2020, to make OpenCitations develop from a small university project based on time-limited grant incomes to being an open infrastructure globally recognized for the provision of open citation data and bibliographical metadata. We want to thank all our members and donors, for trusting our mission and sustaining OpenCitations activities with their continuous and generous support, despite the pandemic and post-pandemic times. 

While retracing our work in the last three years, we are astonished by the achievements our team has accomplished, and by how in such a limited time frame OpenCitations has approached David Shotton’s initial vision (who is one of the co-directors of OpenCitations), when he first shaped the project back in 2010. Here are just some of the technical developments that have marked the last years:

  • in 2021, COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations crossed the threshold of one billion citations stored;
  • in 2022, we released the two new OpenCitations indexes of open citations, DOCI (citations from DataCite) and POCI (citations from PubMed);
  • we expanded our collection besides the citation data by releasing OpenCitations Meta, a database storing and delivering bibliographic metadata for all the publications in the OpenCitations Indexes, including the publication’s title, type, venue (e.g. journal name), volume number, issue number, page numbers, publication date, identifiers and details of the main actors involved in the document’s publication (the names of the authors, editors, and publishers); 
  • as of October 2023, OpenCitations Indexes contain information on 1.82 billion unique open citations. 

However, the most significant achievements for OpenCiations in the last years have been the creation of a prolific network of collaborations with other Open Science projects, such as OpenAIRE-Nexus, RISIS2 and GraspOS, and the establishment of a structured team, involving young researchers and PhD students, whose work at the University of Bologna has made it possible to work on the technical developments day by day. 

Our results are a strong indicator of the growing sensibility on the theme of the open provision of bibliographical metadata and citation data, of which Open Citations is at the forefront as a founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA). The effort and awareness campaigns led by these initiatives, by DORA and the Open Science community as a whole, have led more and more publishers to a change of heart and to open their reference lists. OpenCitations is an integral part of an ongoing process of transformation of the research environment, and we have collected and interpreted some of the needs of the academic community to plan our future activities and developments. We still need your help and support to make it possible to maintain and improve our infrastructure and to sustain the team working at OpenCitations

If you believe in

  • the importance of open bibliographic data for the creation of reproducible metrics for research assessment exercises
  • the power of the scholarly community to change existing practice by reclaiming ownership of its own data– and you want to become an active part of this change

please consider supporting OpenCitations either via membership or donation. You can find all the information on membership on our website at https://opencitations.net/membership, or you can ask for information by contacting us at membership@opencitations.net

Together, we can work to create an open and inclusive future for science and research. 

Thank You!

The OpenCitations blog posts are now archived on Rogue Scholar with DOIs

Last April, Martin Fenner launched Rogue Scholar, an archive of science blogs aiming to index full-text of blog posts, establish a full-text search, and register DOIs and metadata for all posts. Rogue Scholar works with all blogging platforms that publish scholarly content and have an RSS or Atom feed with full-text content distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license.    

Rogue Scholar currently features 40 blogs, including the OpenCitations blog, with more than 1,000 blog posts that are available via full-text search, with DOIs linking to the original post on one of 40 science blogs. By exploring the OpenCitations blog’s profile on Rogue Scholar, you will find the last 40 posts with summaries (derived from the information you get in the RSS feed), and by clicking on the DOI you will be redirected to the full post on the blog. The DOI metadata include abstract, language, license, and (OECD Fields of Science) subject category for all posts.  

Rogue Scholar is growing day by day, and the increasing involvement of science blogs – from different disciplines and various languages – demonstrates that a central archive of science blogs with full-text content, and DOIs for all blog posts with relevant metadata is feasible, making an important contribution to Open Scholarly infrastructure”. 

Thanks to a recently launched Mastodon instance at Rogue Scholar Social, the OpenCitations blog has now its own Mastodon feed, where you can keep yourself updated about the last posts of the OpenCitations blog, by finding summaries and the related DOIs linking to the full post – and you can also boost and comment, of course! Please follow us at https://rogue-scholar.social/@opencitations  to not miss anything.  

If you are managing a Science Blog and are interested in adding it to the Rogue Scholar archive, or if you are just interested in the topic of metadata for scholarly blogs, please contact info@front-matter.io  

 

OpenCitations is part of the CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment (OI4RRA)

Last March, the  Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) launched its call for members to propose Working Groups and National Chapters. The aim of the call (which was closed in June) was to foster the creation of Working Groups that would work as ‘communities of practice’ to enable systemic reform of research assessment by providing mutual learning and collaboration on specific thematic areas 

A group of 23 Coalition members, including University of Bologna’s personnel working at OpenCitations, collaborated in designing and proposing the CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment (OI4RRA), focusing on having open infrastructures for making research assessment more transparent and responsible, and thus enabling the research community to be in full control of the data and indicators it relies on in assessments. 

We are now thrilled to announce that the proposed Working Group has been accepted, and will start its activities in the next months, with the mission to “enable institutions to move from proprietary infrastructure and research information, to open alternatives–in support of the transition to responsible research assessment practices. This effort will take into consideration the wide range of research outputs and open science practices and address the diversity of the global research community”. 

The CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment will work to facilitate the use of existing open infrastructures, -, with the aim to make it possible a transition to a fully OI4RRA ecosystem – interconnected, decentralised and open –  that is fit to serve existing and emerging needs of reformed RRA agendas.  

For more information visit the dedicated section on CoARA’s website, and read the full list of participants in OI4RRA here 

The French National Fund for Open Science renews its support to OpenCitations

We are delighted to announce that the French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) has renewed its commitment to sustaining the activities of four SCOSS-selected infrastructures, including OpenCitations. 

The four supported infrastructures (OpenCitations, the DOAB, LA Referencia and ROR) “were evaluated by the jury composed by SCOSS, then according to the exemplary criteria of the Committee for the Open Science, which notably guarantee transparency and the participation of the scientific communities in their governance”.

Since 2020, the FNSO has acknowledged OpenCitations as an infrastructure worth its financial support, thanks to its mission of disseminating bibliographic and citation metadata in open access with a level of quality and coverage, thus providing a workable, free and open alternative to the academic community’s current dependency on proprietary tools. OpenCitations’ work therefore frees up citation analysis, promotes the evolution of bibliometric indicators and the broadening knowledge of science.

The FNSO is now contributing to OpenCitations with recurring funding for 2023, 2024 and 2025 for an annual amount of €75,000. This generous support will be crucial in sustaining the maintenance and development of OpenCitations’ technical infrastructure, and in supporting the future activities of the OpenCitations team, that are publicly displayed in the OpenCitations Roadmap

We are extremely honoured and grateful to the French National Fund for Open Science for renewing the pledge of such a portion of its open science budget to support our work. 

Discover POCI, the index of open citations from PubMed 

We’re happy to announce POCI, 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. 

Currently, POCI’s December 2022 release contains 717,654,703 citations from 26,024,862 bibliographic resources, and is based on the dump of NIH Open Citation Collection dated November 2022. 

Citation URLs

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).

OCIs can be resolved using the OpenCitations OCI Resolution Service.

Access to POCI data

All the data in POCI:

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:  

All the OpenCitations Indexes have six characteristics in common, summarized here: https://opencitations.net/index   

 

Discover DOCI, the index of open citations from DataCite

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

Currently, DOCI’s December 2022 release contains 169,822,752 citations from 1,753,860  citing resources, and is based on the last dump of DataCite dated 22 October 2021 provided by the Internet Archive

Citation URLs

Each citation (i.e. an individual of the class cito:Citation) is identified by an URL structured as follows:

 https://w3id.org/oc/index/doci/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://opencitations.net/index/doci/ci/080010504060836132137200707121027-080010504060836161221130313.html), 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 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).

OCIs can be resolved using the OpenCitations OCI Resolution Service.

Access to DOCI data

All the data in DOCI:

More information is available at https://opencitations.net/index/doci. 

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: 

All the OpenCitations Indexes have six characteristics in common, summarized here: https://opencitations.net/index  

New documents that present OpenCitations’ mission, unique benefits, present status and future plans

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:

OpenCitations Mission Statement,

The Uniqueness of OpenCitations   and

OpenCitations – Present Status and Future Plans,

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 and financially 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.

Thank you!