Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

OpenCitations has been awarded the Certificate of Excellence in Research Infrastructure Leadership

On 8 May 2026, during the Graduation Ceremony of the Executive Masters in Management of Research Infrastructures (EMMRI), OpenCitations was awarded the Certificate of Excellence in Research Infrastructure Leadership. This recognition was achieved through the participation of members of the OpenCitations team in the 2024–2026 class of the Excellence Programme for Research Infrastructures, an initiative designed to support research infrastructures in developing organisational competencies across their teams, fostering sustainable and effective leadership models.

The OpenCitations participants included Director Silvio Peroni, CTO Ivan Heibi, Research Manager Claudio Fabbri, Systems Administrator Mario Petrella, and Communications Director Chiara Di Giambattista, who took part in the 11 modules of the programme. Across these modules, OpenCitations built a network of relationships and exchanges with other selected research infrastructures and strengthened its competencies in the following areas:

  • Governance and organisation
  • Developing a sustainable funding model for RIs
  • International law and compliance
  • Financial management
  • Raising awareness
  • Leadership and team building
  • Service provision
  • Infrastructure and resource management
  • Strategic management of RIs
  • Business development and innovation in the RI context

The graduation ceremony, the final step of this two-year journey, brought together faculty members and representatives from the research infrastructures. Among the reflections shared during the event, one phrase captured the spirit of the programme: “Leadership is a form of enthusiasm”. Indeed, this experience made it clear that such enthusiasm was widely shared among participants, including colleagues from different infrastructures worldwide. The exchange of perspectives promoted throughout each module of the programme fostered a more grounded and pragmatic understanding of how research infrastructures evolve and collaborate in an international environment.

We would like to thank the EMMRI team, in particular the Director Professor Marialuisa Lavritrano, and Professor Enrico Guarini and Drs. Laura Farina, for selecting OpenCitations for this programme and for developing an initiative that is both well-structured and internationally relevant, hosted at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

At the end of this programme, OpenCitations carries forward the responsibility to build on the stimulating discussions and insights gained throughout the course. We will work to further develop the competencies acquired and reflect on both the strengths and limitations identified through this exchange, to continue supporting the long-term sustainability and development of OpenCitations as an open scholarly infrastructure

From the Community Survey to action: the OpenCitations Roadmap for 2026

In February, we published a blog post presenting the main outcomes of the Community Survey we conducted between October and December 2025 to help guide the future direction of OpenCitations. As we explained in that post, the data collection and analysis phase resulted in a report that we have made openly available on Zenodo. Following the publication of the report, the OpenCitations Team entered a phase of internal evaluation to define priorities for the coming year. In doing so, we carefully considered the need to ensure that OpenCitations continues to grow in a sustainable way, aligned with the capacity and resources of our team. 

As a first step in this process, the survey outcomes were presented at the International Advisory Board Meeting held in February. This meeting provided an opportunity for an open, constructive discussion of OpenCitations’ strategic direction. The feedback and reflections from that dialogue were fundamental in shaping the next stage of planning. Indeed, building on these discussions, a dedicated internal Task Force Meeting was then held to define the roadmap priorities. This meeting involved the Director, the CTO, the Research Manager, the Systems Administrator, and the Community Manager, who worked together to translate the survey insights and the International Advisory Board feedback into concrete strategic decisions. 

The starting point for this discussion was a slide highlighting three key areas of debate: 

  • Whether to prioritize facilitating the use of OpenCitations by improving interfaces, tutorials, and documentation or to focus primarily on expanding metadata coverage. 
  • Whether to reinforce the role of OpenCitations as a backend infrastructure, or to invest more effort in frontend development to increase its visibility. 
  • Whether to pursue a vertical growth model, focused on strengthening the existing core community, or a more horizontal approach aimed at achieving broader adoption across the research community. 

Based on these considerations, we decided to focus on a limited set of priorities for 2026. It’s important to note that the aspects that are not included in the most immediate roadmap should not be interpreted as being dismissed. On the contrary, since all these points originate from valuable feedback we received from the community, each of them represents an area that we intend to address in the future, in proportion to the size of our team and the resources available. We have thus defined a set of realistic objectives for the period M3–M12 of 2026 that are consistent with the nature of OpenCitations and with the work already underway. 

A key outcome of this planning phase is the decision to strengthen our engagement with the core community during 2026. One important step in this direction will be the development of tutorials tailored to specific use cases. For example, we plan to create a clear and comprehensive “Getting Started” tutorial to support Web developers in working with the OpenCitations APIs. At the same time, we will continue working on expanding our data coverage by pursuing the ingestion of new data sources. In particular, during 2026, we will integrate data from OUTCITE and MATILDA into OpenCitations.  

Among the use cases identified by the community, a particularly relevant one concerns semantic interoperability within research infrastructures. For this reason, we have decided to focus significantly on backend development in this area. This direction is consistent with the work we are already carrying out within the GRAPHIA project, where the implementation of a REST API endpoint compliant with the Scientific Knowledge Graph – Interoperability Framework (SKG-IF, https://skg-if.github.io) represents one of the key assets, with the aim of defining a common mechanism for interoperability across open scholarly infrastructures. The SKG-IF recommendation includes the definition of a shared exchange format, interoperability mechanisms based on SPAR ontologies, a common validation approach, and an API specification.  

Finally, one activity that sits at the intersection between backend development and coverage expansion is the work we are conducting with TIB Hannover and OJS on crowdsourcing citation data. PKP, OpenCitations, and TIB have started implementing a workflow within OJS to support this effort. In particular, TIB has developed an OJS plugin that enables the ingestion of citations from OJS journals directly into OpenCitations. During 2025, OpenCitations has been working on the development of an automated crowdsourcing workflow that will allow these citations to be directly integrated into our collections. 

All these activities have been collected, together with their respective timelines, within our public roadmap, which remains the main reference point for monitoring the progress of OpenCitations development:  https://trello.com/b/RprHYoKL/opencitations  

Now that the analysis and planning process related to the Community Survey has reached its conclusion, we would like to renew our sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to it. We are grateful to the members of our community who responded so thoughtfully to the survey, to the partners who helped disseminate it, and to the members of the International Advisory Board who supported both the design of the survey and the strategic reflections that followed. The dense and coherent roadmap that has emerged from this process is the result of a collective effort. It reflects OpenCitations’ commitment to listening to its community and turning those insights into concrete objectives that will guide our work, to strengthen the open availability of open metadata and the interoperability between research infrastructures.  

Shape the future of OpenCitations: take our Community Survey

OpenCitations has always existed thanks to and for its community, a diverse network of institutions and individuals who believe in the value of open scholarly data.

As a community-based open infrastructure, our strength lies in collaboration. The insights, feedback, and experiences shared by our community partners are what help us refine our services and keep our mission aligned with the evolving global research ecosystem.

To continue building an infrastructure that truly reflects the needs of the scholarly community, we’ve now launched the OpenCitations Community Survey.

Whether you are a supporter, a partner institution, a user, or have simply come across OpenCitations by chance (even if you’ve never used our data or looked closely at what we do), this survey is your opportunity to share your experience, tell us what works, what could be improved, and what you’d like to see in the future.

Your insights will directly inform how we evolve our services and activities to better support your work, research, tools and, more generally, the circulation of open knowledge.

It takes about 10 minutes to complete, and every single response helps us strengthen OpenCitations as a community-driven open infrastructure.

👉 Take the survey and help shape the future of OpenCitations:
https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/GYSZ230686

An announcement from GraspOS: Final Conference of the GraspOS Project

SAVE THE DATE

Opening Research Assessment

Final Conference of the GraspOS Project

12–13 November 2025

CNR Area della Ricerca di Pisa, Italy

We are pleased to announce the Final Conference of the GraspOS project: Opening Research Assessment, taking place on 12–13 November 2025 in Pisa, Italy.

For research assessment to truly support Open Science, we must prioritise transparency, inclusivity, and fairness in how we recognise research activities and contributions. This means not only ensuring that all contributions to Open Science are valued but also promoting openness in the data, tools, services, and other resources used in the assessment process.

The Conference will present the results of the GraspOS project and engage in discussions on transforming research assessment into a system that is open, responsible and aligned with the principles of Open Science.

Invited talks and expert panels will address critical topics for advancing a responsible research assessment system that fully embraces Open Science principles including:

● Open infrastructures for responsible research assessment

● Transparent and inclusive assessment practices

● Recognition of contributions to Open Science

The event will be hybrid, free of charge, and registration will be required. A call for poster contributions aligned with these themes will open soon, and a detailed programme and registration link will follow shortly.

The conference will be followed by the final event of the CoARA Italian National Chapter on the afternoon of 13 November.

Stay tuned, and please save the date!

The GraspOS Project Team


Website: https://graspos.eu/graspos-conference-2025 

GRAPHIA Project Launched in January 2025

OPERAS hosted the launch of the GRAPHIA project in Brussels earlier this year. On the 22nd and 23rd January, 2025, 21 partner institutions met in OPERAS’ office and online to celebrate the project which is funded by the European Commission for over €8 million, plus an additional €1.6 million from the Switzerland State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation. GRAPHIA aims to create the first comprehensive Social Science and Humanities (SSH) Knowledge Graph designed to integrate fragmented data into a unified entry point. The focus will be on disciplines within SSH, which contribute essential knowledge to society influencing culture, economics and ethical decisions among other factors. The project is expected to run from January 2025 to December 2027.

OPERAS coordinates the project with the purpose of significantly improving SSH data visualisation and analysis capacities through pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. The project addresses gaps in provision that leave SSH knowledge disconnected and poorly available. This will be accomplished by leveraging AI to create a Knowledge Graph that will deliver an expansive representation of knowledge in the diverse disciplines within SSH. GRAPHIA will empower researchers to uncover patterns and insight from unstructured data, illuminating social phenomena and cultural trends with clarity that is not available in current solutions.  

A major highlight of GRAPHIA will be an SSH Citation Index, an innovative framework for citation data extraction and enrichment to accelerate access to previous literature across the range of SSH disciplines. GRAPHIA integrates industry partners into this project to amplify the project’s impact by gaining the perspective and expertise from a range of stakeholders, reflecting the influence of SSH disciplines on society. Such collaboration will motivate innovations that apply to academics while being commercially viable, opening SSH disciplines and solutions to new markets and technologies. GRAPHIA is the signal of its partner organisations commitment to open science and increasing EU research infrastructures capabilities, enhancing global competitiveness, while facilitating broad and long-lasting impact of project results.

Part of OpenCitations’ personnel working at the University of Bologna is involved in GRAPHIA for the development of tools to enable data extraction from PDFs, and OpenCitations itself serves in the project as a source of information for the Knowledge Graph.

To follow the progress of the GRAPHIA project, join us on Bluesky and/or LinkedI

Contact GRAPHIA at: contact@graphia-ssh.eu

 

Wheels Are in Motion: OpenCitations’ progress in 2024

January is a strange month. After the festive whirl of December’s gatherings, it quickly shifts into the hustle and bustle of the new year’s commitments and the work that follows the holidays. For us at OpenCitations, however, it has become a tradition to take a moment at the end of this month to pause after the first hectic weeks of the year. This time allows us to reflect on the achievements of the past year and plan for the future with a clearer mind.  

2024 has been a transitional year, one where we’ve worked “in the shadows”, focusing on a series of behind-the-scenes improvements that will transform the OpenCitations experience for our users and services. Over the past few years, we have gathered valuable feedback from our community and have taken it to heart, using it to inform the enhancements to our infrastructure. These changes will be rolled out in the coming months of 2025, and we are excited to share a glimpse of what’s to come.

1. Strengthening the Foundations of the Technical Infrastructure

We closed out 2023 by announcing the redesign of our technical infrastructure, a crucial step for better managing OpenCitations’ data sources. This shift was necessary to enhance the efficiency of our processes and ensure scalability for the future. In particular, in recent months, our development team has been focused on addressing issues within OpenCitations Meta, to enable to set up again the usual bimonthly updates from one of our main data sources (i.e. Crossref). This work is essential to guarantee the timely release of the OpenCitations Index. 

We were happy to announce the July 2024 release of the Index, containing more than 2 billion citations, but we are now working to ensure that the release frequency is consistent throughout 2025. Our focus will be on maintaining a steady pace, ensuring regular updates, and improving the overall reliability of our data.

2.A Tool for Data Curation: HERITRACE

In addition to infrastructure improvements, we have been developing a new tool designed to streamline data curation: HERITRACE. This semantic data management system is tailored specifically for the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector. HERITRACE serves as an editor for curating bibliographic data, allowing users to track provenance and monitor changes over time. 

It has been tested in a small-scale project with a specific dataset, and early results have been promising. HERITRACE is designed to be user-friendly, offering non-technical users a seamless experience while providing an efficient administrative interface for technical staff. In comparison to other established platforms such as OmekaS, Semantic MediaWiki, Research Space, and CLEF, it stands out for its ease of use, provenance management, change tracking, and customization options. 

HERITRACE is built upon SHACL for data modeling and integrates the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM) for tracking provenance and changes. Looking ahead, we plan to expand its capabilities with the integration of a robust authentication system and broader data compatibility through the RDF Mapping Language (RML), making it an even more powerful tool for digital heritage management. 

In the context of OpenCitations, the goal is to use HERITRACE to enable curating bibliographic metadata and citation data by expert users (e.g. librarians), aiming at increasing the quality of the data OpenCitations provides. 

In the video below, our developer Arcangelo Massari provides a quick overview and tutorial of HERITRACE:

 

3.New and Ongoing Collaborations

During 2024, we have honoured the aspects of our mission statement describing community engagement as a core point in OpenCitations’ activities. These partnerships are vital to advancing OpenCitations’ purposes and goals, and we look forward to continuing the collective work into 2025. In particular, we expanded the network of partnerships and released some outcomes of previous collaborations:  

  • Our project within the European Research Council (2023-2024) dedicated to the mapping of metadata collections between OpenCitations Meta and OpenAlex, has concluded. The full analysis is presented in the following article involving OpenCitations Developer Elia Rizzetto:  

Rizzetto, E.; Peroni, S., Mapping bibliographic metadata collections: the case of OpenCitations Meta and OpenAlex, in: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS, «CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS», 2024, 3643, pp. 155 – 168 (Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Information and Research Science Connecting to Digital and Library Science, IRCDL 2024, Bressanone – Brixen, Italia, 2024)  

  • January 2025 has formally marked the beginning of two new exciting projects in collaboration with OPERAS and other institutional and industrial partners, building upon our previous work together within the GraspOS Project. During 2024, it’s been inspiring being involved in the work packages of the project, where we have kept collaborating with our colleagues from OpenAIRE. Also, GraspOS is doing a terrific job in the promotion of the news and initiatives of its community, through its newsletter, and its blog (where you can also find an exclusive interview with our Director and one with our Head of Comms – hi, it’s me!), so we suggest you subscribe and follow if interested in the theme of Open Science and Responsible Research Assessment.
  • In April, we were included in Infra Finder, a tool developed by Invest in Open Infrastructure to foster discovery, adoption, and investment in open infrastructure services. The intuitive interface and usability make Infra Finder a helpful tool that could make OpenCitations and other infrastructure services more visible to a wider and diverse community. 
  • We continued our participation in the SCOSS Family, the community of practice gathering the Infrastructures from SCOSS six pledging rounds, and we are now part of the internal working groups aimed at exploring ways of collaboration, sharing resources, creating impact and contributing to creating a stronger open ecosystem.  
  • Lastly, OpenCitations is proud to be one of the supporters of the Barcelona Declaration, a key initiative launched in April 2024 aimed at fostering open access to scholarly information and advancing the principles of open science. This aligns perfectly with OpenCitations’ mission to promote transparency, accessibility, and collaboration in scholarly communication. By supporting the Barcelona Declaration, we reaffirm our commitment to the shared values of openness, inclusivity, and the democratization of knowledge, all of which are integral to creating a more equitable and accessible academic landscape for researchers, institutions, and the global community.  

4.Welcome and Farewell

Alongside the growth of our network, the OpenCitations team has also expanded, now counting 11 collaborators, including Research Fellows and PhD students, with the addition of Ivan Heibi as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Mario Petrella as Systems Administrator. 

Besides the enrichment brought in by our new colleagues, 2024 also brought a great loss. The founder and director of OpenCitations, David Shotton, passed away in May, leaving not only an institutional but, most of all, a human void, as a mentor and guide. We wanted to remember him in this blog post, which aims to serve as a virtual wall of tribute, constantly evolving, where anyone wishing to share a thought for David can do so by sending an email to comms@opencitations.net.  

5.Renewal of the International Advisory Board for OpenCitations

After four years of prolific collaboration, the end of 2024 also marked the conclusion of our International Advisory Board’s first term. We’d like to extend our deepest gratitude to the former members for their invaluable insights and guidance throughout their tenure. Looking ahead, we are thrilled of the new members who have decided to put their expertise at OpenCitations’ service, and we can’t wait to begin working closely with them in 2025.

6.Some Spoilers for 2025

As we close out this year’s reflections, we’re also looking ahead to 2025. In this upcoming year, we will begin to see the fruits of our work from 2024. We are committed to continuously improving our offerings and services for our users and the community that supports us. We exist because of them, and we are here to serve their needs. 

In the coming weeks, you will also notice some exciting changes: OpenCitations will be undergoing a rebranding, along with updates designed to make our virtual presence more engaging and user-friendly. We’ve heard feedback about how challenging it can sometimes be to navigate our information, and we’re eager to make improvements that will help our users find what they need more easily. 

Finally, we invite all our readers to participate in the 5th Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC), which will be held in Bologna on May 28-29, 2025. WOOC aims to gather anyone interested in the widespread adoption of practices for creation, sharing, reuse and improvement of open scholarly metadata. This year’s edition of the workshop will be a special one, gravitating around the following theme: “Open Access of Research Information”. 

In particular, the first day will be dedicated to the Bologna Meeting on Open Research Information, to encourage discussion between the signatories and supporters of the Barcelona Declaration and other interested bodies and collaboratively orient the common roadmap, thus allowing the articulation of the outcomes that have recently been discussed during the Paris Conference on Open Research Information. 

The second day will be dedicated to invited contributions, presentations and a poster session selected among the participants for the call for contributions on the workshop theme. 

While the submission period for contributions is closing tomorrow, January 31 (h.23:59 AoE), there will still be opportunities to register as participants after the deadline, at the following link: https://forms.gle/Z7J36XSdPa9tkSop7. Please visit https://workshop-oc.github.io/ for all the information. We look forward to meeting you in Bologna!