The Open Citations Project is global in scope, designed to change the face of scientific publishing.
It aims to make bibliographic citation links as easy to use as Web links. Its goals are three-fold:
- To establish OpenCitations.net, a public RDF triplestore for biomedical literature citations.
(Note: In this context, a bibliographic citation is a reference within a particular citing work to another publication termed the cited work. This use of the word ‘citation’ should be clearly distinguished from the common related use of this word to indicate the cited work itself. Within this application, ‘cite’ and ‘citation’ denote the performative act of citation itself, not the target document of that citation.)
- To harvest the reference lists from many current and recent open access journal articles, and to convert these datasets into RDF, starting with those in UK Pubmed Central, those published by the Public Library of Science and Biomed Central, those from other publishers willing for CrossRef to release their data, and articles from other Open Access repositories like EPrints.
- To publish these citation datasets as Open Linked Data on the Talis Connected Commons Platform under an open data license in both human- and computer-accessible formats.
As such, the Open Citation Project seeks to promote citation datasets as first class information objects. The reference list from each article processed will be published as an individual named graph, with its own individual Digital Object Identifier (DOI) assigned by the relevant publisher via CrossRef or by the British Library on behalf of the DataCite Project.