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OpenCitations selected for SCOSS second funding cycle

The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) is launching its second funding cycle, and OpenCitations is one of three open science infrastructure organizations whose services have been evaluated and selected for presentation to the international scholarly community for crowd-sourced sustainability funding, along with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).

OpenCitations is an innovative infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data concerning academic publications as Linked Open Data using Semantic Web technologies, thereby providing a disruptive alternative to traditional proprietary citation indexes. It also undertakes related advocacy work, particularly as a founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC).

OpenCitations developed the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), a database of open downloadable bibliographic and citation data recorded in RDF and released under a Creative Commons CC0 public domain waiver, which currently contains information about 14 million citation links to over 7.5 million cited resources. In addition and separately, OpenCitations is currently developing a number of Open Citation Indexes, using the data openly available in third-party bibliographic databases. The first and largest of these is COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, which presently contains information encoded in RDF on more than 445 million citations, released under a CC0 waiver.

OpenCitations structures its data according to the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM), that may also be employed by third parties, either for their own use or to structure their data for submission to and publication by OpenCitations. This model uses OpenCitations’ suite of SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies developed to describe all aspects of the scholarly publishing domain. OpenCitations has also published open software of generic applicability for searching, browsing and providing REST APIs over RDF triplestores.

OpenCitations fully supports the founding principles of Open Science. It complies with the FAIR data principles proposed by Force11 that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable, and it complies with the recommendations of I4OC that citation data, in particular, should be structured, separable and open. OpenCitations has published a formal definition of an open citation, and has launched a system for globally unique and persistent identifiers (PIDs) for bibliographic citations – the Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs) – for which it maintains an OCI resolution service.

OpenCitations has the potential to be a game-changer in the scholarly information landscape, giving institutions and individuals the ability to analyse and reuse publication citations in other infrastructures, in library collections, and in research. Open citation data are particularly valuable for bibliometric analysis, increasing the reproducibility of large-scale analyses by enabling the publication of the source data upon which analytical results are based. Since citation data are also crucial to evaluating research performance, such access to open, transparent citation data sources is a priority for Open Science.

SCOSS was formed in early 2017 with the purpose of providing a new coordinated and targeted crowd-sourcing and cost-sharing framework to enable the Open Access and Open Science communities to support the open infrastructure services on which they depend. In its first funding cycle, more than 1.5 million euros was pledged by more than 200 institutions worldwide to help fund and sustain the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and SHERPA/RoMEO.

With the launch of its second funding cycle, SCOSS is appealing to academic institutions and their libraries, research institutes, publishers, funding organisations, national and regional governments, international organisations, learned societies and service providers worldwide —  everyone who is invested in Open Access and Open Science — to support one or more of these three new selected open infrastructure services through a three-year commitment.

For more details about the services, suggested funding levels, and how you can help support OpenCitations, please see https://sparceurope.org/download/7913/ or contact us at donations@opencitations.net.