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 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 billionunique 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.
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 toOpen Scholarly infrastructure”.
Thanks to a recently launchedMastodon 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
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 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.
We are pleased to announce that, after two online editions, the 2023 edition of the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata will come back to Bologna, on 26-27 October 2023. – https://workshop-oc.github.io.
During the two-day event, researchers, policy-makers and scholarly publishers will gather in the historical location of the University of Bologna to take part in the plenary presentations and discussions around this year’s theme:
The value of open scholarly metadata for research assessment purposes.
Participation
If you wish to participate in the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2023 as an attendee, please fill in the form by providing the requested information and a short bio to apply for the event. You will receive a notification of acceptance by 25 June. In case of oversubscriptions, the organisers will select attendees from among those who have applied.
If you wish to talk in the Workshop of Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2023, please fill in both the first part and the second part of the application form to submit a contribution (max 500 words) that fits this year’s theme “The value of open scholarly metadata for research assessment purposes”. The organizing committee will decide if the selected submissions will involve either a talk of 10-minute duration, with a 5-minute discussion following, or a poster presentation.
Application deadline: 21 May 2023 11 June 2023 ( h. 23:59 AoE ).
Fees and expenses
For the accepted attendees and contributors, we request a small registration fee (VAT included) of €100 to cover expenses (€25 for students). We will provide lunches and refreshments on all days, and a free workshop dinner on Thursday 26 October.
Those attending will be expected to cover the cost of their own travel and accommodation, and a list of recommended hotels and guest houses is available here.
Details of how to pay will be sent with the notification of acceptance together with information to finalize the registration.
Please circulate this invitation to any colleagues that you think might be interested in attending this workshop.
Venue
Bologna is home to numerous prestigious cultural, economic and political institutions as well as one of the most impressive trade fair districts in Europe. In 2000 it was declared the European capital of culture, and in 2006, a UNESCO “city of music”. Bologna’s porticoes have been listed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021.
The University of Bologna is the oldest university in the western world, and one of the largest universities in Italy (with about 90,000 enrolled students).
The workshop will take place at the University of Bologna in the heart of the city – the Department of History, Cultures, and Civilization (Italian translation: Dipartimento di Storia, Culture e Civiltà), Piazza S. Giovanni in Monte, 2, Room “Aula Prodi”.
The event will be also live-streamed.
List of organizers
Giovanni Colavizza (University of Amsterdam; ScholarIndex)
Chiara Di Giambattista (University of Bologna; OpenCitations)
Ivan Heibi (University of Bologna; OpenCitations)
Philipp Mayr (GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences; EXCite/OUTCite)
Silvio Peroni (University of Bologna; OpenCitations)
Matteo Romanello (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne; ScholarIndex)
David Shotton (University of Oxford; OpenCitations)
Ludo Waltman (Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University; VOSViewer)
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.
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 happy to announce the 3rd edition of the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC2022), to be held online on 5 October 2022 (h. 15-18 CEST).
It has now been two years since the last edition of the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC2020) took place as an online event. During that event, the virtual format did not constrain an enriching and stimulating debate, fostered by the distinguished voices of the speakers involved.
In the past two years, the Open Science ecosystem has been enriched by growing infrastructures, new projects, and the increasing availability of open scholarly data. OpenCitations itself is now hosting over 1.36 billion open citations. We would like WOOC2022 to re-create a theme-focused virtual space to share updates, thresholds and challenges. Like the last event, WOOC2022 will take the form of a three-hour webinar for researchers, scholarly publishers, funders, policy makers, and opening citations advocates, interested in the creation, reuse, and improvement, of open citation data and open scholarly metadata, with speaker contributions followed by Q&A sessions. The workshop is organized around the following topics:
Reforming research assessment with open citations and open scholarly metadata;
Artificial intelligence to support the extraction and analysis of citations and metadata;
Sustainability of open science infrastructures;
Availability of open citations and open scholarly metadata in scholarly disciplines.
Participation
The participation is free of charge and requires no registration. The event will be live-streamed on OpenCitations YouTube channel and it will be possible to interact with the speakers through the YouTube live comments section during the streaming.
Program
During the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata, the talks of the distinguished speakers will be divided into four sessions, with one 5-minute break. At the beginning of the Workshop, OpenCitations director Silvio Peroni will acknowledge the selected author’s video contributions, whose links will be made available on the workshop website for engaging with interested parties and encouraging a broader discussion.
15:10 – 15.30 Victoria Moody: Lift, shift and re-use: Repurposing open access in new ways: The possibility (and probable necessity) of ensuring the capability and sustainability of research infrastructure assets through the enhanced deployment of open science approaches, creating new pathways for established approaches and extending their impact.
15:30- 15:50 Alberto Martín-Martín: Managing the scholarly record
16:35- 16:55 Jennifer Lin and Ana-Maria Istrate: Essential frontiers: open data & software citations, an automated ML approach
16:55- 17:15 Philipp Mayr: Handling Non-source items in the project OUTCITE
Session IV
17:15- 17:35 Chiara Di Giambattista: Where were we? The role of the community in the present and future of OpenCitations
17:35-17:55 John Chodacki
17:55- 18:00 David Shotton: Roundup discussion and conclusion
Visit https://workshop-oc.github.io/ to read the talks’ abstracts and find more information about the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata.
All the workshop materials will be made available at
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.
In March, The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) celebrated, together with the generous funders and the projects involved (including OpenCitations), the achievement of an amazing milestone: a total of 4 million Euros raised so far for supporting the growth and development of Open Science Infrastructures. This significant sum is not just a number, but a concrete sign of the commitment of numerous institutions all over the world to ensure the success of vital organs of the Open Science ecosystem. Thanks to the pledges recently made, the new infrastructures selected for the third SCOSS pledging round have now started developing their services and can now look to the future with more surety.
At the end of 2019, OpenCitations was selected by SCOSS for its second pledging round, and since then much progress has been made. As the OpenCitations’ founder and director David Shotton recently stated:
“OpenCitations is growing, thanks to the generous support from our members and donors, and we thank SCOSS sincerely for bringing us into contact with them. The citation coverage provided by OpenCitations is now approaching parity with that of the leading commercial citation indexes, and our ambition, within the next five years, is for OpenCitations to be routinely used by our worldwide stakeholders as their primary source of comprehensive scholarly citation information”.
In 2020, OpenCitations monitored the achievements of the first year of SCOSS support and shared the most important updates in a blog post. After a review from SCOSS Advisory Group and the SCOSS Board, the OpenCitations 2021 report to SCOSS is now available in the SCOSS May newsletter. We’re proud of the successful developments that 2021 brought with it in many areas, from the technical enhancements to OpenCitations to its new supporters and partnerships.
After a two-year-long collaboration, we in OpenCitations recognise that one of the most precious benefits of being part of SCOSS is working within a community: SCOSS not only provides a framework but also a real family of supportive institutions that support the Infrastructures during their growth and provide a safety net if troubles occur along the path. The bi-monthly meetings organized by the SCOSS team enable dialogue with the other infrastructures within the same pledging round, while presentation and promotion to the institutions worldwide are fostered by participation in webinars and conferences. During 2021, OpenCitations participated in 16 events, and in 5 of them (LIBER Webinar 2021, JISC Webinar 2021, LIBER Annual Conference 2021, Open Science Fair 2021, and Open Access Tage 2021) OpenCitations’ director Silvio Peroni gave talks together with the representatives of others infrastructures involved in the SCOSS second pledging round.
In compliance with the POSI principles, SCOSS encouraged OpenCitations to set up an open governance structure. As described here, the organizational bodies included in the OpenCitations present governance are three: the Directors, the International Advisory Board, and the Council. Although executive power is still currently vested in the hands of the Directors, in the last two years the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, a committee that now comprises nine Open Science experts from different professional and academic backgrounds, has had a crucial role in guiding the OpenCitations activities, and it is now working on strategic developments in terms of collaborations, policies, support and governance. Moreover, last December OpenCitations organized a Webinar in conjunction with its Annual Meeting to present and discuss with the OpenCitations Council members OpenCitations’ recent developments and future plans.
OpenCitations is highly reliant upon the connections we have created and on people working together: thanks to the support we received throughout the last two years, the OpenCitations team has grown and now includes six people employed by the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna, the administrative body for OpenCitations. Besides the previously announced appointments of Claudio Fabbri (Research Manager), Chiara Di Giambattista (Communications Director and Community Development Manager), Giuseppe Grieco (Software and Systems Developer), and Arcangelo Massari (Software Developer, working within the OpenAIRE-Nexus project), early in 2022 Ivan Heibi, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bologna, joined OpenCitations with responsibility for the technical infrastructure, and Arianna Moretti, who recently graduated in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge, joined as a software developer. This enlarged team, involving young and motivated researchers, is working on numerous projects to be announced later in 2022. You can learn more about OpenCitations’ ongoing activities on our public roadmap.
OpenCitations’ aim continues to be the publication of open data describing the bibliographic citations linking global scholarly publications, with depth and scope, while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy and provenance. Most importantly, OpenCitations services will always be free, making global scholarly citation data available at zero cost and without restriction for third party analysis and re-use.
With its support, SCOSS has been helping OpenCitations to pursue its mission and spread the benefits of Open Science. However, 2022 will be the last year of the three-year-long support ensured by SCOSS. OpenCitations activities won’t stop in 2023 — indeed there still are many long-planned activities that we hope to initiate in the near future, given sufficient resources. This is why OpenCitations requires ongoing support from the scholarly community. All the information you may require to start helping us financially is available on the OpenCitations website: https://opencitations.net/membership
By supporting OpenCitations, you will embrace and sustain the ideals and vision of Open Science, and you will help in creating a more open, democratic and fair knowledge environment.