Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

OpenCitations is a plural: insights from the OpenCitations Community Survey

At OpenCitations, we have always described ourselves as community-driven and community-governed infrastructure. This definition deeply reflects our nature, since OpenCitations was born as a non-profit Open Science infrastructure to support open scholarship for the benefit of the scholarly community, and it continues to rely on that same community for its sustainability and governance, through memberships and participation in strategic decision-making processes. 

For this reason, it is essential for us that both our technical development and our outreach activities remain aligned with the real needs of the academic community. Over the past year, we have focused on strengthening our technical infrastructure and increasing awareness of OpenCitations’ values and activities. We are now entering a phase in which future priorities and developments need to be defined, at a time when the landscape of open citation services has become more crowded and complex. This makes it increasingly important for OpenCitations to clarify its positioning within the research ecosystem. 

To address this need, we came up with a simple insight: instead of assuming what the community needs, we decided to ask directly. This intuition led to the idea of launching a Community Survey. Developed with the support and guidance of the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, the survey was open to anyone in the academic community, including users, members, and people encountering OpenCitations for the first time. It was intentionally broad, covering both technical and outreach aspects. Its goal was not to evaluate performance, but to better understand how OpenCitations is perceived, used, and expected to evolve. 

The survey was open from 20 October to 16 December 2025, and we would like to sincerely thank everyone who took the time to respond and to help disseminate it within their networks. The feedback we received was of high quality, showing a strong level of engagement and a genuine willingness to provide thoughtful answers, especially through the open-ended questions. 

Respondents came from a wide range of backgrounds, primarily within academia and research, including researchers, librarians, information specialists, developers, and professionals working on research infrastructures and scholarly communication. Affiliations were mostly universities, research institutes, libraries, and non-profit infrastructures, reflecting a community already closely connected to Open Science practices. Levels of familiarity with OpenCitations varied considerably, from regular users to people who discovered the infrastructure for the first time through the survey. 

Across responses, OpenCitations was consistently associated with strong values such as openness, transparency, reproducibility, and independence from commercial interests. A recurring theme is the trust in the quality of the data and in the team maintaining the infrastructure. At the same time, awareness of specific services was uneven. While bibliographic and citation databases are relatively well known, more technical components such as APIs, data models, and SPARQL endpoints are mainly familiar to technically experienced users. 

This perception was reflected by usage patterns: OpenCitations often operates behind the scenes, with its data adopted within repositories and other scholarly tools. Citation analysis and metrics are another common use case, where OpenCitations is valued as an open alternative data source to proprietary databases. More specialised applications, such as knowledge graph construction and editorial workflows, were also mentioned, highlighting the flexibility of open citation data. 

When it comes to choosing OpenCitations over other databases, one of the strongest motivations is alignment with Open Science values. Respondents repeatedly emphasised the importance of open licences and the public-good orientation of the infrastructure. At the same time, several barriers remain, concerning in particular the limited coverage in certain areas, delays in data updates, technical complexity, and fragmented documentation. Another limit to adoption is the lack of awareness, together with institutional reliance on commercial databases. 

Regarding community engagement, awareness of OpenCitations often spreads through informal academic networks, conferences, workshops, and mailing lists. Active participation, however, remains limited, since many respondents follow OpenCitations’ activities without directly engaging. Still, there is a clear interest in deeper involvement, especially when it comes to contributing to Open Science, learning new skills, and aligning with institutional priorities around openness and transparency. 

Looking ahead, respondents expressed strong expectations around the expansion and enrichment of citation data, improved interoperability with other infrastructures, tutorials to support non-technical users, and more user-friendly interfaces. 

We are very glad to have opened this dialogue with the community. While some of the feedback confirmed issues we were already aware of, the survey also revealed we had not fully considered, particularly regarding how OpenCitations is perceived within the broader community. Overall, the Community Survey confirms that OpenCitations is widely recognised as a valuable and trustworthy open infrastructure for open science. At the same time, it highlights concrete areas for improvement, especially in usability, coverage, and community engagement. 

We see this survey not as a conclusion, but as a starting point for ongoing dialogue. The detailed results of the survey, including charts and word clouds, are available on Zenodo for public consultation:   

Di Giambattista, C., & Peroni, S. (2026). Summary Report of the OpenCitations Community Survey 2025. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18470862 

This survey now opens a phase of reflection that will inform future steps in our roadmap, and may also lead us to repeat this experiment in the future, exploring alternative formats for community engagement beyond surveys. Above all, we look forward to sharing concrete outcomes of this collaborative process with the community, as we continue to build OpenCitations with the community and for the community. 

 

Shape the future of OpenCitations: take our Community Survey

OpenCitations has always existed thanks to and for its community, a diverse network of institutions and individuals who believe in the value of open scholarly data.

As a community-based open infrastructure, our strength lies in collaboration. The insights, feedback, and experiences shared by our community partners are what help us refine our services and keep our mission aligned with the evolving global research ecosystem.

To continue building an infrastructure that truly reflects the needs of the scholarly community, we’ve now launched the OpenCitations Community Survey.

Whether you are a supporter, a partner institution, a user, or have simply come across OpenCitations by chance (even if you’ve never used our data or looked closely at what we do), this survey is your opportunity to share your experience, tell us what works, what could be improved, and what you’d like to see in the future.

Your insights will directly inform how we evolve our services and activities to better support your work, research, tools and, more generally, the circulation of open knowledge.

It takes about 10 minutes to complete, and every single response helps us strengthen OpenCitations as a community-driven open infrastructure.

👉 Take the survey and help shape the future of OpenCitations:
https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/GYSZ230686

GRAPHIA Project Launched in January 2025

OPERAS hosted the launch of the GRAPHIA project in Brussels earlier this year. On the 22nd and 23rd January, 2025, 21 partner institutions met in OPERAS’ office and online to celebrate the project which is funded by the European Commission for over €8 million, plus an additional €1.6 million from the Switzerland State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation. GRAPHIA aims to create the first comprehensive Social Science and Humanities (SSH) Knowledge Graph designed to integrate fragmented data into a unified entry point. The focus will be on disciplines within SSH, which contribute essential knowledge to society influencing culture, economics and ethical decisions among other factors. The project is expected to run from January 2025 to December 2027.

OPERAS coordinates the project with the purpose of significantly improving SSH data visualisation and analysis capacities through pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. The project addresses gaps in provision that leave SSH knowledge disconnected and poorly available. This will be accomplished by leveraging AI to create a Knowledge Graph that will deliver an expansive representation of knowledge in the diverse disciplines within SSH. GRAPHIA will empower researchers to uncover patterns and insight from unstructured data, illuminating social phenomena and cultural trends with clarity that is not available in current solutions.  

A major highlight of GRAPHIA will be an SSH Citation Index, an innovative framework for citation data extraction and enrichment to accelerate access to previous literature across the range of SSH disciplines. GRAPHIA integrates industry partners into this project to amplify the project’s impact by gaining the perspective and expertise from a range of stakeholders, reflecting the influence of SSH disciplines on society. Such collaboration will motivate innovations that apply to academics while being commercially viable, opening SSH disciplines and solutions to new markets and technologies. GRAPHIA is the signal of its partner organisations commitment to open science and increasing EU research infrastructures capabilities, enhancing global competitiveness, while facilitating broad and long-lasting impact of project results.

Part of OpenCitations’ personnel working at the University of Bologna is involved in GRAPHIA for the development of tools to enable data extraction from PDFs, and OpenCitations itself serves in the project as a source of information for the Knowledge Graph.

To follow the progress of the GRAPHIA project, join us on Bluesky and/or LinkedI

Contact GRAPHIA at: contact@graphia-ssh.eu

 

The Dutch Research Council sustains OpenCitations

We are most grateful to the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for its commitment to sustaining the activities and developments of three SCOSS-selected infrastructures (PKP, OpenCitations and ROR) together with the Netherlands Reproducibility Network.

The selected infrastructures have been evaluated as “essential for a high-quality open science communication system”, and part of a network that “helps to promote reproducibility and strengthens the transition to open science”. OpenCitations, in particular, plays a strong role in reducing “the reliance on commercial products for doing bibliometric research and citation measurement” by providing an open database of citations.

This pledge carries out NWO’s enhancement of Open Science policy, as part of its strategy 2023-2026. The Dutch Research Council aims to support and encourage projects that put Open Science into practice, thus contributing to the transition towards a healthier research culture.

The yearly funding of 8000 EUR (year 2023-2025) will help us realise our planned future developments. Thank you, NWO!

The French National Fund for Open Science renews its support to OpenCitations

We are delighted to announce that the French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) has renewed its commitment to sustaining the activities of four SCOSS-selected infrastructures, including OpenCitations. 

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. 

Please help with OpenCitations’ entry in Wikipedia

The Wikipedia entry for OpenCitations is woefully out of date, inaccurate and brief. As Directors of OpenCitations, Silvio and I are unable to improve this situation because of Wikipedia’s proper conflict-of-interest restriction on self-promotion.

OpenCitations is actively seeking greater involvement from members of the global academic community, as explained in our Mission Statement. One way in which such individuals, particularly those who are both existing Wikipedia editors and already know about OpenCitations, can help OpenCitations, while at the same time supporting Wikipedia in its quest for accurate information, is by revising and expanding the present Wikipedia entry on OpenCitations to reflect the infrastructure’s current activities and data holdings, while maintaining perspective and a neutral point of view. This will increase the availability of reliable knowledge about OpenCitations and its place in the ecosystem of Open Science infrastructures.

Background information to assist in this task is available in the cannonical paper describing OpenCitations:

Silvio Peroni and David Shotton (2020). OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship. Quantitative Science Studies 1: 428-444. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00023;

in previous posts in the OpenCitations Blog and in the documents to which those posts link, particularly in:

Transparency meets open citations

The OpenCitations Roadmap is now publicly available on Trello

OpenCitations receives the Open Publishing Award in Open Data

Coverage of open citation data approaches parity with Web of Science and Scopus;

additionally from:

The OpenCitations Github software and information repository, from which the OpenCitations logo can be obtained;

and also from OpenCitations’ recent toots on Mastodon.

We await your work with anticipation!!