The incentives for new OpenCitations innovative solutions
Two years ago, in their canonical 2020 QSS paper on OpenCitations, Silvio Peroni and David Shotton anticipated the creation of the new database, OpenCitations Meta, able to “offer a faster and richer service” by storing bibliographic metadata “in house”. Meta would “avoid duplication of data by efficiently permitting us to keep […] a single copy of the metadata for each of the bibliographic entities involved as citing or cited entities in the different OpenCitations’ citation indexes”, would remove the requirement for potentially slow API calls to external metadata sources such as Crossref and ORCID, and would enable us to index citations involving entities lacking DOIs.
Important synergies to achieve goals
Today, thanks to the recent involvement of OpenCitations in two EC-funded projects, the OpenAIRE-Nexus Project (Horizon 2020 EU funded project, GA: 101017452) and the RISIS2 Project (Horizon 2020 EU funded project, GA: 824091), the development of OpenCitations Meta has commenced, with a planned release date later in 2022.
The OpenAIRE-Nexus project started in January 2021 to embrace and expand the operation of a portfolio of thirteen services, provided by OpenAIRE infrastructure, public institutions, organisations and universities, classified into three portfolios entitled PUBLISH, MONITOR, and DISCOVER. The OpenAIRE-Nexus portfolios focus on the demands of the three main categories of the research lifecycle. Therefore, OpenAIRE-Nexus makes sure such services are integrated to provide a uniform Open Science Scholarly Communication package for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Within the OpenAIRE Nexus project there is scope for producing not only support materials (factsheet, guides, video tutorials, demos) but also training sessions where the services in the three portfolios will be showcased, anticipating the EOSC onboarding process. The role of OpenCitations in the project is to provide open bibliographic citations, and interconnect and integrate (and vice versa) functionalities with the OpenAIRE Research Graph and more OpenAIRE-Nexus services such as EpiSciences, OpenAIRE MONITOR) the core component of OpenAIRE infrastructure and services and of the EOSC Resource Catalogue.
Additionally, we are happy to announce our recent involvement in the RISIS2 Project. The Research Infrastructure for Science and Innovation Policy Studies (RISIS) is a project funded by the European Union under a Horizon2020 Research and Innovation Programme. RISIS2 involves 18 partners working together to create and maintain a research infrastructure for the field of Science, Technology, and Industry (STI) Studies, and to build an advanced research community in this field. OpenCitations’ contributions to RISIS2 will include not only the creation of OpenCitations Meta but also the development of a new citation index of open references, the OpenCitations Index of DataCite Open Citations (DOCI), which will be based on the open reference holdings of DataCite and, together with COCI, will be cross-searchable through our unified OpenCitations API.
Lessons learnt so far
A year into the OpenAIRE-Nexus project, we have found that one of the most significant benefits for OpenCitations is our involvement with this wide cooperative network of European research infrastructures, services, and communities, within which we can exchange experiences, ideas, and knowledge, and discuss any challenges and outcomes with our colleagues. More importantly, OpenCitations becomes positioned within the Open Science ecosystem, as a valuable innovative infrastructure with strong proof of integration and interoperable operations. Being part of the OpenAIRE-Nexus team has opened up more future challenges and expectations, and raised the bar for the inclusion of more functionalities of value. Thanks to the dedication of its efficient communication team, OpenAIRE is also helping us by communicating OpenCitations services to additional users and stakeholders, by inclusion within the comprehensive OpenAIRE services catalogue, by releasing an OpenCitations factsheet and by permitting us to present the latest information on OpenCitations through established events (i.e. Open Science FAIR 2022). FAIR and openness of information is our motto, and we strongly promote this through all our activities.
Expanding our team
As announced in our previous blog post “Five reasons why 2021 has been a great year for OpenCitations”, the support we receive from the EU as part of OpenAIRE-Nexus has enabled our recent appointment of Arcangelo Massari, a software developer who is now playing a crucial role in the creation and development of OpenCitations Meta.
As the year 2022 progresses, we look forward to bringing you further information about other new goals for OpenCitations, made possible by the support we receive from our numerous partnerships.
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].
On September 27, OpenCitations’ director Silvio Peroni, together with Niels Stern (DOAB/OAPEN) and James MacGregor (PKP), held the online workshop “How Open Infrastructure Benefits Libraries” during the Open Access Tage 2021. Open-Access-Tage (Open Access Days) are the annual central platform for the steadily growing Open Access and Open Science community from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and are aimed at all those involved with the possibilities, conditions and perspectives of scientific publishing.
The workshop gathered three of the SCOSS-supported infrastructures to discuss how Open Infrastructures (OIs) could encourage the engagement of university libraries, and how they could be beneficial game-changing alternative to commercial infrastructures. This theme, which was also been presented during the last LIBER conference, was here discussed under a new perspective, by involving the specific case of the libraries from the German-speaking region. Their point of view particularly emerged during the second part of the workshop, during which the participants were divided into two breakout rooms to discuss two questions each. These are the answers and comments that emerged from the discussions.
1. What would prevent or encourage libraries in the German-speaking region to support open infrastructures?
The three main concepts held to be crucial in this field were transparency, promotion and governance.
Transparency: German libraries and public institutions often deal with strict funding limitations relating to donations. It is therefore crucial for OIs (a) to present in a clear way how libraries can get involved and the money needed, (b) to communicate what they do and how they can add value to libraries compared to other services, and (c) to clarify the direct return and benefits on investments. These points would make it easier to recommend OIs internally, especially when people from subject-specific institutions are interested in subject-independent OIs. Point (b) leads to the Promotion issue: Open Infrastructures should promote themselves non only on a global level, by communicating their impact in the open research movement as against non-transparent propitiatory services, but also at a local level, by providing information about the usage (and the value) of their services at an institutional and/or national level. This case-by-case narration (with attention to the specific benefits) would make it easier for the institutions to evaluate the sustainability of the investment. An incentive to donate is being actively involved in the community governance, i.e.through a board membership.
Nevertheless, is also necessary for libraries to “take courage” when investing in such OIs, and, when possible, to overcome administrative boundaries by forming consortia. Finally, of particular note was a desire to see locally-managed sub-communities that could speak specifically to the German (or whichever) language environment, much as ORCID arranges itself.
2. Community Governance. What kind of involvement do you want to see, how do you want to be involved?
Some common problems which prevent the institutions from being involved are (a) a general concern about the fact that negotiations with publishers are typically the main focus of OA discussions – leaving little time to focus on OIs and other open initiatives, and (b) a lack of time, or of guidelines, for evaluating the different infrastructures to invest in. This is why SCOSS was appreciated as an intermediary in the decision process, because of its own rigorous evaluation and selection mechanism. The community-funding approach proposed by SCOSS thus seems to be the preferred way by which to support OIs.
Regarding community governance, one idea could be to involve interested scholars in the governance of the open infrastructures (with the library acting as an interface between the open infrastructure and the scholars) rather than only involving library staff – although this idea was argued against in the second group, as researchers are often percieved as too busy to be functional in operational infrastructure groups. What also emerged from this second question is an interest in community involvement on different levels, for example as a community of practices or through discussion boards, mailing lists, periodic meet-ups, workshops, newsletters, etc. The community could also be articulated into local sub-communities, as in the successful case of ORCID and ORCID_DE.
Authors: Ludo Waltman, Bianca Kramer, David Shotton
In this blog post, Ludo Waltman, Bianca Kramer, and David Shotton, co-founders with colleagues of the Initiative for Open Abstracts, celebrate the first anniversary of the initiative.
On September 24 last year, the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) was launched. We started the initiative as a group of colleagues working in the publishing industry, for scholarly infrastructure organizations, at university libraries, and at science studies research centers. I4OA called on scholarly publishers to make the abstracts of their published works openly available in a suitable infrastructure, preferably by submitting them to Crossref, and it continues to make this call. Openness of abstracts makes scholarly outputs easier to discover, it enables new types of research analytics, and it supports science studies research.
In this blog post, we celebrate the first anniversary of I4OA by summarizing the progress made so far and by discussing how I4OA fits into the broader landscape of many ongoing developments toward increased openness of the metadata of scholarly outputs.
How much support for open abstracts do we have?
When I4OA was launched one year ago, the initiative was supported by 40 publishers, including Hindawi, Royal Society, and SAGE, who are founding members of the initiative. Among the initial supporters of I4OA there were commercial publishers (e.g., F1000, Frontiers, Hindawi, MDPI, PeerJ, and SAGE), non-profit publishers (e.g., eLife and PLOS), society publishers (e.g., AAAS and Royal Society), and university presses (e.g., Cambridge University Press and MIT Press). Some of the initial supporters of I4OA are open access publishers, while others publish subscription-based journals.
Over the past year, the number of publishers supporting I4OA has more than doubled. The initiative is currently supported by 86 publishers. Publishers that have joined I4OA over the past year include ACM, American Society for Microbiology, Emerald, Oxford University Press, and Thieme. I4OA has also been joined by a substantial number of national and regional publishers, for instance from countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia.
In addition to this, I4OA is supported by a large number of stakeholders in the research system, including many scholarly infrastructure providers.
— Initiative for Open Abstracts (@open_abstracts) October 19, 2020
However, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis, the four largest publishers in terms of the number of published works, have not yet joined I4OA. These publishers appear to monetize their abstracts by selling them to abstracting services, and they seem to fear that joining I4OA may cause them to lose these revenue streams. Elsevier might also perceive openness of abstracts as a competitive threat to its Scopus business. Elsevier, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis have not yet submitted any abstracts to Crossref, while Springer Nature has started to submit abstracts, but only for its open access content.
How many open abstracts do we have?
On September 1st 2021, 12.3% of the 89.4 million journal articles indexed by Crossref had an open abstract. Focusing on the so-called current content in Crossref (i.e., content from the last three years), the share of journal articles with an open abstract is substantially higher. Of the 12.1 million journal articles in the period 2019-2021, 30.1% had an open abstract.
Figure 1 shows the increase over the past few years in the percentage of journal articles in Crossref that have an open abstract. For current content, this percentage increased from 14.9% in September 2019 to 30.1% in September 2021, clearly showing the effect of I4OA. For backfiles (i.e., content that is at least three years old), the increase is more modest, from 4.8% in September 2019 to 9.5% in September 2021. This increase reflects the efforts made by several publishers (including Hindawi, Royal Society, and SAGE, three founding members of I4OA) to make abstracts openly available not only for their new content but also for all their older content.
Figure 1. Increase in the percentage of journal articles in Crossref that have an open abstract.
The above statistics are specifically about journal articles. Looking at all content types in Crossref, including proceedings articles, book chapters, and books, the share of open abstracts is somewhat lower. On September 1 this year, 24.8% of the current content and 7.3% of the backfiles had an open abstract.
Figure 2 provides a breakdown by publisher of the percentage of journal articles published in the period 2019-2021 and documented in Crossref that have an open abstract (horizontal axis). The figure also shows the total number of journal articles of a publisher in the period 2019-2021 (vertical axis; logarithmic scale).
Figure 2. Number of journal articles of a publisher in Crossref in the period 2019-2021 vs. percentage of journal articles that have an open abstract
Publishers that support I4OA, colored orange in Figure 2, tend to have a high percentage of journal articles with an open abstract. They typically do not reach 100%, because some of the content they publish does not have an abstract. There are a few publishers that only recently started to open their abstracts, and so for these publishers the percentage of open abstracts is still relatively low. Publishers that have not yet expressed support for I4OA are colored blue in Figure 2. Most of them have a low percentage of open abstracts, and many do not have any open abstracts at all.
The progress made by individual publishers in opening their abstracts can be clearly seen by comparing Figure 2 with a similar figure published in this blog post last year.
What else happened over the past year?
A very positive development in the past year is the accomplishment of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a sister initiative of I4OA that campaigns for publishers to make the references of their published works openly available in Crossref. In the first half of 2021, Elsevier, American Chemical Society, and Wolters Kluwer all opened their references. With the exception of IEEE, all major publishers now support I4OC. This development seems to show that most publishers recognize the importance of making the metadata of their published works openly available, suggesting that many of them may also want to join I4OA.
A less positive development was the announcement made last May that Microsoft Academic will be discontinued at the end of the year. At the moment, Microsoft Academic is the most important data source for open abstracts. As shown in a recent presentation by two of the I4OA founders, more than half of the scholarly outputs indexed both by Microsoft Academic and by Crossref have an open abstract in Microsoft Academic. Only 10% of these outputs have an open abstract in Crossref. Hence, the discontinuation of Microsoft Academic will greatly reduce the availability of open abstracts, unless publishers take up their responsibility to submit abstracts to Crossref. OurResearch, which is building a replacement for Microsoft Academic, has already announced that it will only be able to make abstracts available if publishers submit them to Crossref (or PubMed).
Another important development is the growing adoption of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). These principles aim to ensure that scholarly infrastructures serve the interests of the scholarly community, and they reduce the risk of the scholarly community losing its key infrastructures (as is happening right now with Microsoft Academic). The POSI principles have been adopted by Crossref and OpenCitations, two founding members of I4OA. OurResearch, mentioned above, has also expressed a commitment to these principles. By adopting the POSI principles, these infrastructure organizations have made a clear commitment to serve the interests of the scholarly community and to ensure the long-term availability of scholarly metadata.
Next steps
In light of the closure of Microsoft Academic at the end of the year, it is more important than ever to get broad support for I4OA. This is further reinforced by the increasing dependence of research analytics on abstracts. While research analytics based on citations continue to play an important role in research assessments and research on research (e.g., topic mapping, analyzing emerging trends and research fronts), the need to broaden the analytical toolbox is widely recognized. Many providers of research analytics are introducing new indicators and tools. In particular, analytics for assessing the contribution of research to the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) are attracting a lot of attention (e.g., in the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings). These analytics typically identify SDG-related research by searching for specific terms (‘climate change’, ‘hunger’, ‘poverty’, and so on) in the titles and abstracts of scholarly outputs. Openness of abstracts is essential to develop a proper understanding of what these analytics do and do not tell us, and to make sure these analytics are used in a responsible way.
Publishers carry the primary responsibility for making abstracts openly available. We therefore call on publishers that do not yet support I4OA to join the initiative and to open their abstracts. The I4OA team is available to answer questions about the initiative and to provide help to publishers that want to join. Do not hesitate to contact us.
We also encourage other stakeholders in the research system to actively support openness of abstracts. As shown in Figure 3, in a recent Metadata 20/20 webinar, participants mentioned abstracts as the most important metadata element for which openness should be an essential requirement in negotiations with publishers. This highlights the crucial contribution that research institutions and research funders can make by mandating openness of abstracts in their agreements with publishers.
Figure 3. Metadata elements to be negotiated with publishers, as discussed by participants in a recent Metadata 20/20 webinar.
This blog post is published under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Open Science Fair is an initiative of OpenAIRE, co-organized by the following key international initiatives in the area of Open Science: COAR, EIFL, Force11, LA Referencia, LIBER, OPERAS, Sparc and Sparc Europe. A biannual event, it brings together “perspectives from different actors” and “suggests ways in which communities can work together to produce roadmaps for the implementation of Open Science”. The 2021 online event saw the participation of distinguished speakers in keynote talks, roundtable discussions, workshops and training sessions. At OpenCitations, we are grateful and proud to have been invited to participate in this collaborative and inspiring virtual fair.
The Lightning Talk “ScholeXplorer and OpenCitations as the new frontier of open citation indexing” was a presentation by Silvio Peroni, co-authored with Paolo Manghi (OpenAire), Alessia Bardi (CNR-ISTI), and Sandro La Bruzzo (CNR-ISTI), describing two of the 14 open data services included in the MONITOR portfolio of the OpenAIRE-Nexus project that are used to monitor Open Science, research impact and open citations – the domains of interest of the two services presented. ScholeXplorer provides access under a CC-BY license to a huge set of links between datasets and scholarly publications, while OpenCitations, as an open infrastructure for open bibliographic metadata and citations, grants access to more than 1.18 billion DOI-to-DOI citation links, released with a CC0 public domain waiver. Both services also provide tools that allow users to query their data, with the common final goal of providing open links between scholarly resources and making them available within the OpenAire Research Graph.
As Silvio Peroni recalled, last July this article by Ian Hutchins:
B. Ian Hutchins; A tipping point for open citation data. Quantitative Science Studies 2021; 2 (2): 433–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_c_00138
This workshop involved Agata Morka and Vanessa Proudman from SCOSS, and representatives of the three Open Science Infrastructures involved in the Second SCOSS Funding Cycle, namely Silvio Peroni (OpenCitations), Niels Stern (DOAB/OAPEN), and James MacGregor (PKP). The starting topic of the Workshop, in which the funder perspective was provided Jean-Francois Lutz (University of Lorraine), was the paradox: although the scholarly community increasingly relies on Open Science Infrastructures, it seems very difficult to get them “to realize that there are some operational and development costs related to their existence”. In this discouraging environment, SCOSS plays a crucial role in promoting such services to potential supporters. The most recent SCOSS annual survey, presented by Jon Treadway (Great North Wood Consulting) during the workshop and involving 217 institutions from across the world, helps us understand the impact and external perception of SCOSS on a global scale. It revealed a correspondence between the geographical areas in which SCOSS is best known and the locations of the major supporters, which perhaps should not surprise us. More importantly, it found that, in addition to interoperability and global significance, community governance was one of the most important aspects of the infrastructures that institutions chose to invest in. In particular, the chance to be directly involved in governance was found to act as a great incentive for university libraries to invest in external infrastructures. Community governance is a core aspect of the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures and, as underlined in this blog post, OpenCitations is working hard to achieve full compliance.
Obstacles to offering support were found to include administrative barriers, although these could be reduced if individual supporters joined consortia. Overall, however, such administration hurdles were minor issues. More significantly, some institutions were unable to pledge funds in the short term, and there was seen to be a need to raise awareness of the necessity of generating cultural change around the issue of community support. As Vanessa Proudman underlined, it is crucial to create dialogue with institutions and libraries, in order to foster the understanding that supporting Open Science Infrastructures could be beneficial for both students and researchers, and a realization that the minimum annual contribution requested by SCOSSfrom any one libraryto support such an infrastructure was less than a single article processing charge (APC), trivial in comparison with the huge annual institutional subscriptions for access to journals and citation indexes.
In a separate SCOSS interview, Marin Dacos (Open Science Advisor to the Director-General for Research and Innovation at the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation) defined Open Science Infrastructures as “a common good of the scholarly community”, distinctly different from the services of commercial publishers. An essential value of an Open Scholarly Infrastructure is its community engagement and, from this perspective, the community funding approach promoted by SCOSS is the most efficient. As Silvio Peroni said, “What after SCOSS? SCOSS helps in creating a community around the service, and this community remains even after the three-year period of SCOSS promotion is over”.
Maybe, by fostering this growing global network of institutions and services committed to promoting a more open research, Open Scholarly Infrastrucutres can find an answer to the question “How can we not be invisible?” and achieve not just ‘sustainable’ but sustained funding from the academic community.
We are happy to announce OpenCitations’ participation in a number of online conferences and events during the next few weeks. Our directors Silvio Peroni and David Shotton will be speaking at the Open Science Fair 2021, the OASPA Conference 2021 and Open Access Tage.
Open Science Fair 2021 (20-23 September) is an event organized by OpenAIRE, in collaboration with some key international initiatives in the area of Open Science: COAR, EIFL, Force11, LA Referencia, LIBER, OPERAS, Sparc, Sparc Europe. Like a real fair, the visitors can explore virtual pavilions, participating in various Keynote Talks, Parallel Sessions and Workshops dedicated to Open Science. Silvio Peroni will give two talks on Tuesday 21:
The Workshop “The perils of being invisible. Collective funding models for Open Science infrastructure” (16:30-18:00 CEST) “will help identify the main challenges of collective funding models for Open Science Infrastructure, as well as explore the path forward to make them more efficient”. Silvio Peroni, Niels Stern (DOAB/OAPEN)James MacGregor (PKP), Agata Morka (SPARC Europe/SCOSS), Jon Treadway (the Great North Wood Consulting), Jean-Francois Lutz (University of Lorraine) and Vanessa Proudman (SPARC Europe) will reflect on the evanescence of Open Science Infrastructure (OSI) in library budget considerations. The speakers will also promote interaction with other workshop participants in order to create a collective dialogue. You can register for the event here: https://www.opensciencefair.eu/2021/workshops/the-perils-of-being-invisible
The OASPA Conference 2021 (21-23 September), entitled “Designing 21st Century Knowledge Sharing Systems”, will be dedicated to “many timely and fundamental topics relating to open scholarly communication”, including “the ongoing impact of the pandemic”. David Shotton will take part in the Poster Lightning Talks Session 3 (Thursday 23, 1-2 pm BST), with the title “OpenCitations – what does the future hold?”, a reflection on OpenCitations’ values, data, services, achievements so far, and plans for the future. For further information and registration: https://oaspa.org/conference/
Silvio Peroni, together with James MacGregor (Public Knowledge Project) and Niels Stern (OAPEN) will hold the Workshop “How Open Infrastructure Benefits Libraries?” (September 27, 11:30-13 CEST) as part of the Open Access Tage 2021 (27-29 September), an annual event dedicated to Open Access initiatives and community. During the workshop, the speakers will investigate the social and economic value of open infrastructures for libraries. For more information and to register for the event: https://oat21.sched.com/event/kdFg/workshop-2-how-open-infrastructure-benefits-libraries
We thank the organizers of these prestigious international events for having invited OpenCitations to participate. The Open Science resounds and grows through such community-centered initiatives.
If you wish to learn more about Open Science, ongoing Open Access initiatives, and OpenCitations’ commitment to and activities within these areas, don’t miss the opportunity to participate in these on-line conferences … see you there!
CDL’s commitment to sustainable open scholarship has great value for the global scholarly community. Through its investments and partnerships, CDL aims to create an international academic and librarian dialogue, trusting in the idea that “the university, its scholars and its libraries thrive when we transcend organizational boundaries and commit ourselves to shared investments”.
CDL’s contribution will generously support OpenCitations throughout 2021-2023. CDL funding in the fiscal year 2020-2021 also includes two other SCOSS-endorsed infrastructures, OAPEN and DOAB, the non-profit organization Open Access Switchboard, and the services PsyArXiv and SCOAP3 Books. As can be read in the recent post by Ellen Finnie, this investment reflects CDL’s “commitment to ’invest in open’ by allocating a portion of our collections funding to the development of open content and infrastructure in support of UC scholarship and teaching”.
OpenCitations team is grateful to be included in CDL’s ongoing investment in open infrastructure. Thank you!
In his call for open citations, Dario Taraborelli hailed the scholarly citation graph (in which the nodes (vertices) are individual academic publications and the links (edges) represent bibliographic citations from one publication to another) as one of humankind’s most important intellectual achievements.
We all understand that the inclusion within our own academic publications of bibliographic references to the works of others is one of the most explicit ways of acknowledging the thoughts, discoveries, achievements and influences of other scholars, and their contributions to our own work. Not only does what we gain from their publications enable us to make intellectual progress, by “standing on the shoulders of giants” as Newton once famously observed [1], but the influence of these publications extends forward in time across the entire intellectual landscape, like gigantic shadows cast at sunset, whether or not those influenced by these publications have occasion to reference them in their own works.
At the anterior margin of a crawling cell, cellular protrusive extension (for example of a pseudopodium) is achieved by the catalysed polymerization of new filaments of the cytoskeletal protein actin from attachment sites on an existing stationary actin filament network, pushing the cell margin forward [2]. The scholarly citation network (or citation graph, the two terms here being used interchangeably) is similarly dynamic and temporally directional, being extended forward as new works of scholarship are published. Extension of knowledge is achieved by the catalytic inspiration provided by existing academic publications, themselves temporally stationary within the expanding citation network, leading to the publication of new works of scholarship that cite these previous publications and thus extend the citation network further into the future. The citation graph is thus not just an acyclic directed graph, but an acyclic temporally directed graph. Indeed, it is this temporal aspect of the citation network that is one of its most important features.
To use another analogy, the human genealogical tree is inherently multidimensional and difficult to represent pictorially in its entirety, because each new birth brings together the family trees of the child’s two parents. However, unless the parents are seriously promiscuous, the resulting genealogical tree is not impossibly complex. In contrast, the scholarly citation network is much more highly interlinked, since each new publication cites not just two but many preceding (‘parent’) publications, which themselves may beget many other citations.
Visualization of the global scholarly citation graph, or portions of it, is thus inherently difficult, and the important temporal aspect of the graph is the one ignored by almost every method used for visualizing aspects of that graph. Existing methods may take the broad view, showing the links, and the strength of those links, between one scholarly domain and another, thus visualizing the ‘structure of science’. Alternatively, they may take a more detailed view of a small section of the graph, visualize the proximity of individual publications to one another. Often a radial display is chosen for this, that shows in closest proximity those papers directly referenced by the selected publication in the centre, then at a greater radius those papers referenced by the cited papers shown in the inner circle, and so on. Because of the graph’s complexity, such displays quickly looses intelligibility after two citation links.
Among a small number of visualization applications that do not ignore the temporal aspect of the graph is Citeology, a temporally based citation network visualization tool developed some years ago by Justin Matejka and colleagues at the design software company Autodesk [3]. Unfortunately, this innovative software prototype was not central to that company’s mission, development ceased, and the Citeology Java app is no longer available. However, in his last email to me, Justin Matejka kindly offered to help others re-create this application.
There is thus an urgent need for innovative new open-source visualization tools that will clearly and dynamically display portions of the global citation graph, for example the direct and indirect citation connections between any two publications or any two individuals, along the temporal axis of publication date. Developers within the open science community please step forward!
References
[1] Isaac Newton, in a 1675 letter to Robert Hooke, wrote “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” https://discover.hsp.org/Record/dc-9792/
[2] Bruce Alberts et al. (2014). Molecular Biology of the Cell. 6th Edition. Garland Science. Chapter 16, The Cytoskeleton.
“Infrastructure at its best is invisible. We tend to only notice it when it fails. If successful, it is stable and sustainable. Above all, it is trusted and relied on by the broad community it serves. Trust must run strongly across each of the following areas: running the infrastructure (governance), funding it (sustainability), and preserving community ownership of it (insurance)”.
These areas are fully define the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), which provide a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organizations and initiatives that support the research community can be run and sustained.
As far as we are aware, Crossref was the first infrastructure to publish its compliance with POSI, detailed in Geoffrey Bilder’s December 2020 blog post
OpenCitations too espouses POSI and, in January 2021, we monitored the extent of our own compliance with POSI, the results of which are shown in the following diagram.
Governance
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Coverage across the research enterprise
We gather citations from global scholarship
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Stakeholder governed
Advisory board currently lacks executive power and is not elected
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Non-discriminatory membership
Membership open to all those espousing open science
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Transparent operations
Everything is open
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Cannot lobby
OpenCitations lobbies to achieve open scholarly citations and bibliographic metadata; it does not engage in political or financial lobbying
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Living will
Since all our data open, others can recreate our service
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Formal incentives to fulfill mission & wind-down
No formal plan for wind-down has yet been drawn up
Sustainability
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Time-limited funds used only for time-limited activities
Grant income should be used solely for grantprojects
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Goal to generate surplus
Goal not yet realized – income so far too limited
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Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months
Goal not yet realized – income so far too limited
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Mission-consistent revenue generation
Membership fees and solicited donations
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Revenue based on services, not data
All data and services freely given to community, and thus do not generate income
Insurance
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Open source
All software under open source licenses
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Open data
All data available under CC0 waiver
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Available data
All data available via REST APIs, SPARQL endpoints, query interfaces and data dumps
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Patent non-assertion
We will not patent anything: OpenCitations’ infrastructure is free to replicate
We at OpenCitations are proud of the results reached in the Insurance area, but realise that we still have some was to go in the other areas. Although the general situation is already satisfying, we are working to strengthen our weak points.
We want to express our gratitude to the 18 institutional members and customers of the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries which have now pledged 89,250 euros to support OpenCitations over the next three years. This generous donation is part of a total funding of 320,250 euros destined for the three services currently being promoted by SCOSS: DOAB and OAPEN,PKP, and OpenCitations.
The Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries involves all cantonal universities, the ETH Domain, the Swiss National Library and other institutions from the fields of education and research as well as from the public sector, with the core task of licensing of e-resources (electronic journals, databases, eBooks) for its members and customers.
As can be read in this post, Susanne Aerni, Head of Consortial Services commented on the pledge: “This pledge exemplifies the broad Swiss commitment to vital infrastructure for Open Access and Open Science. All Swiss Universities, all institutions of the ETH-domain, some Universities of Applied Science, CERN, and the Swiss National Science Foundation support these three vital services through the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries.”
Thank you, Switzerland, for your support to OpenCitations!