Looking back at 2025, OpenCitations experienced a year defined by both visible engagement and foundational work where, while the technical aspects and collaborative workflows were strengthened behind the scenes, many accomplishments were shared openly with (and for the benefit of) the community. What follows, therefore, is not just a list of milestones but a narrative of alignment between the technical architecture, outreach, and collaboration.
Embracing and managing growth
One of the central challenges for OpenCitations in 2025 was how to grow without losing quality. Over the year, four major data dumps were released: two for OpenCitations Meta and two for OpenCitations Index. The last 2025 Index dump, released in July, surpassed 2.2 billion citation records. Although we acknowledge that there were fewer dumps than usual in terms of frequency, we justify this slower pace by the fact that over the last two years the technical team has committed to a comprehensive infrastructure redesign, focusing particularly on data refinement and quality improvement. The goal was to provide fewer dumps, but with higher quality. Now that the mechanisms are well-established, we expect to increase the frequency of dumps in 2026.
Working to include new data sources
Many of the advances of 2025 emerged not from isolated development but from collaboration. Significant effort went into improving how citation data enters OpenCitations in the first place. Collaborations with external projects explored new ways to make the ingestion of citation data more efficient, potentially widening the range of sources that can contribute to the open citation ecosystem.
In particular, PKP, OpenCitations, and TIB have started implementing a workflow in OJS. TIB has created a plugin for OJS to enable ingestion of OJS citations directly into OpenCitations. During 2025, OpenCitations has been working on crowdsourcing an automatic workflow to ingest these citations into its collections directly.
Similarly, collaboration with the Matilda project, a bibliographic and bibliometric platform for open science, focused on validating tabular bibliographic data before ingestion, with the perspective of including Matilda citations as a future source of OpenCitations.
Re-engineering for the living will
Part of the 2025 work took place out of sight. The OpenCitations technical team undertook a comprehensive redesign of the infrastructure architecture, moving toward a microservices-based approach supported by Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
The redesign was guided by the long-term perspective of improving scalability and reliability, reducing operational friction, and ensuring that the infrastructure could move, adapt, and survive beyond any single deployment context. The result is an infrastructure that can be redeployed or transferred with minimal overhead. In this context, in light of the meaningful progress made in ensuring the “living will” of the infrastructure, in 2026 we plan to update our compliance assessment with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, currently at version 2.0, released in October 2025. This version clarifies and expands on governance, sustainability and insurance principles for open scholarly infrastructures, including commitments to stakeholder governance, open licensing, clear data availability and interoperability to ensure resilience and continuity.
At the same time, attention turned to the question of quality as an ongoing practice. We successfully tested HERITRACE, a semantic data-curation tool developed for the GLAM sector, enabling intuitive editing of bibliographic data along with provenance and change tracking (announced at the end of 2024), in a small pilot, standing out from existing platforms thanks to its ease of use, strong provenance management, and high customisation. Within OpenCitations, HERITRACE will allow users to curate bibliographic and citation metadata, improving overall data quality.
OpenCitations’ window display completed
In early 2025, OpenCitations also turned its attention outward, introducing a renewed visual identity, including a new logo. This was not simply an aesthetic update, but part of a broader effort to better communicate OpenCitations’ values: openness, transparency, and community.
The website redesign followed the same logic. With a cleaner structure and clearer navigation, the site now offers faster access to core services, while also making OpenCitations itself more visible. It also places greater emphasis on OpenCitations’ community-driven nature, with expanded sections highlighting the organisation’s mission, values, team, membership programme, partners, and international collaborations, making it easier for all users to engage with and understand OpenCitations’ work.
Talking about Open Research Information at WOOC2025
In May 2025, OpenCitations hosted the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC) in Bologna. Over two days, researchers, publishers, funders, policy-makers, and infrastructure providers came together to discuss open access to research information.
The workshop combined strategic discussion, such as the Bologna Meeting on Open Research Information, with community presentations, posters, and invited talks, creating a space where policy, infrastructure, and scholarly practice could meet. As in previous editions, WOOC served not only as a venue for sharing work, but as a space for coordination, alignment, and long-term thinking around open scholarly metadata.
From audience to co-creation
As part of the effort dedicated to improving community awareness of OpenCitations through dedicated outreach initiatives, in October, we launched our own Newsletter, creating a regular channel for sharing updates, technical developments, and community stories, helping to keep a diverse international audience informed and connected.
In parallel, OpenCitations launched a Community Survey to actively gather feedback from users, partners, and the research community as a whole. Rather than assuming needs or priorities, the survey explicitly invited critique, uncertainty, and suggestion, treating community members not as end users, but as co-creators of OpenCitations’ future. The responses will directly inform future development, reinforcing the idea of OpenCitations as a genuinely community-driven infrastructure.
What’s next?
If 2025 can be characterised by a single idea, it is continuity. Rather than chasing novelty, OpenCitations invested in making its data more reliable, its infrastructure more resilient, and its relationship with the community stronger.
These foundations matter. They enable growth without fragility, collaboration without dependency, and openness without compromise. As OpenCitations moves forward, the work of 2025 will remain present: not always visible, but deeply embedded in how open citation data is produced, shared, and sustained.

Fig. 1: An overview of the data ingestion workflow, starting from the data source-specific conversion and production of citations and bibliographic metadata tables, progressing through the META process and the assignation of an OMID identifier to each bibliographic record involved in a citation, and culminating with the exposition of the OpenCitations Index collection of OMID-OMID unique citations.