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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. 

 

Building, Maintaining, Listening: OpenCitations’ 2025

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.

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