Open Infrastructure – OpenCitations blog

Find OpenCitations on Infra Finder, a new tool to discover and support Open Infrastructures

If you are a leader of a Library or a Research Institution and would like to learn more about the existing open infrastructures that could help your institution to evolve in the research environment, but you don’t know where to look for, you can now use Infra Finder, a brand-new tool aimed at foster discovery, adoption, and investment for open infrastructure services. Infra Finder is launched by Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), and is designed to be the go-to resource for anyone navigating the complex landscape of infrastructure services and standards enabling open research and scholarship.

The tool stems from the feedback collected from the community after the launch, in 2022, of the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services pilot project in 2022, from which IOI decided to re-envision what outcomes they could affect and rethink what solutions could look like, also by furthering the Open Science principles conveyed by UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science, the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and other Open Science initiatives and guidelines.

We are happy to announce that OpenCitations is among the 56 infrastructures which have accepted IOI’s invitation to be included in this first release of Infra Finder. During its development, IOI team has been constantly collecting feedback from the infrastructures involved, and has conducted user testing to understand how different people might approach it. In OpenCitations we believe that Infra Finder could serve as an helpful tool to make OpenCitations and the other infrastructure services more visible to a wider and diverse community. Infra Finder allows users to easily find and compare the catalogued services, and its intuitive use could work as a starting point towards the creation of a greater awareness of existing open infrastructures, thus leading users to further explore their features and services and, hopefully, to consider the possibility of support their sustainability.

IOI is currently planning to include new services in Infra Finder: if you are part of an organization that would like to be included, you can apply by filling out their Expression of Interest form. IOI will give two identical webinars to share with the community more details about the background and features of Infra Finder and on how interested infrastructure services can express interest in being listed. Register here to the either slot:

May 2, 2024, 1600 UTC / 12pm Eastern

May 3, 2024, 1400 UTC / 10am Eastern (in your time zone)

The IOI blog post for the launch is available at https://investinopen.org/blog/infra-finder-your-hub-for-finding-infrastructure-services-enabling-open-research-and-scholarship

OpenCitations supports the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information for a fundamental transformation in the research information landscape

Research Information can be defined as an information (sometimes referred to as metadata) relating to the conduct and communication of research. This includes, but is not limited to, (1) bibliographic metadata such as titles, abstracts, references, author data, affiliation data, and data on publication venues, (2) metadata on research software, research data, samples, and instruments, (3) information on funding and grants, and (4) information on organizations and research contributors. Research information is located in systems such as bibliographic databases, software archives, data repositories, and current research information systems.

Decision-making in science is often biased by the typology of research information, and too often is based on closed research information, which is locked inside proprietary infrastructures and run by for-profit providers that impose severe restrictions on the use and reuse of the information. As a consequence, errors, gaps, and biases in closed research information are difficult to expose and even more difficult to fix. Indicators and analytics derived from this information lack transparency and reproducibility. Decisions about the careers of researchers, the future of research organizations, and ultimately the way science serves the whole of humanity, depend on these black-box indicators and analytics.

There is an urgency for a fundamental change in the research information landscape towards openness. Indeed, open research information enables science policy decisions to be made based on transparent evidence and inclusive data and information used in research evaluations to be accessible and auditable by those being assessed. It makes it possible for the global movement towards open science to be supported by information that is fully open and transparent.

Today, over 40 organizations, including the University of Bologna, are committing to making openness of research information the norm and to lead this change in the research information landscape. The signatories of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information commit to taking a lead in transforming the way research information is used and produced, to make the openness of information about the conduct and communication of research the new norm.

The full text of the Barcelona Declaration is now publicly shared on barcelona-declaration.org and presents the commitments that all the signatories of the Declaration adhere to, namely

To make openness the default for the research information we use and produce;
To work with services and systems that support and enable open research information;
To support the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information;
To support collective action to accelerate the transition to openness of research information.

In addition to the signatories, the Declaration has been supported by several organizations providing data, services and infrastructures. OpenCitations has declared its support to the Declaration, together with AmeliCA, Crossref, Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), DataCite, EuropePMC, DOAB, DOAJ, Europe PMC, Liberate Science GmbH, OAPEN, OpenAIRE, OurResearch, Redalyc and ROR. OpenCitations believes in the Declaration as a starting point for a substantial change by promoting values which OpenCitations fully supports, as stated in the words of our Director and Associate Professor at the University of Bologna Silvio Peroni:

Since its creation in 2010, OpenCitations has always advocated and actively worked to produce open research information and develop infrastructural technologies to maximise its sharing and reuse in different applicative contexts. Thus, we embrace the Declaration’s goals and commitments and look forward to working with all the signatories to foster the use and production of open research information.

Prof. Silvio Peroni has been a part of the initial team of over 25 research information experts, representing organizations that carry out, fund, and evaluate research, as well as organizations that provide research information infrastructures, which first prepared The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. The group met in Barcelona in November 2023 in a workshop hosted by SIRIS Foundation. The preparation of the Declaration was coordinated by Bianca Kramer (Sesame Open Science), Cameron Neylon (Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, Curtin University), and Ludo Waltman (Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University).

As of April 15, 2024, the list of signatories involves universities and other research performing organizations such as Αthena Research Center (Greece), Charles University (Czech Republic), Coimbra Group (international), Hamburg University of Technology (Germany), I-CERCA – Centres de Recerca de Catalunya (Spain), Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia – Ibict (Brazil), Leiden University (Netherlands), Museo Galileo. Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Italy), Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg (Germany), Sorbonne Université (France), Spanish National Research Council – CSIC (Spain), Udice – French Research Universities (France), UnilLaSalle (France), Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia), Università di Bologna (Italy), Universitat de Barcelona (Spain), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), Université Grenoble Alpes (France), Université Le Havre Normandie (France), Université Paris Saclay (France), University of Coimbra (Portugal), University of Groningen (Netherlands), University of Maribor (Slovenia), University of Milan (Italy), University of Poitiers (France), University of the Azores (Portugal), University of the Balearic Islands (Spain), University of Turku (Finland), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands); research funding organizations and governments, including Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (US), Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation – FCRI (Spain), Dutch Research Council NWO (Netherlands), French Open Science Committee (France), French National Research Agency – ANR (France), Fundació Internacional Josep Carreras (Spain), Région Normandie (France), Regione Toscana (Italy), ZonMw (Netherlands); other organizations: Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya – CSUC (Spain); EOSC Association (international), Latin American Council of Social Sciences – CLACSO (international), National Open Research Analytics, Technical University of Denmark (Denmark), State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine (Ukraine), TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library (Germany), UK Reproducibility Network – UKRN (UK).

There is a need for global and concrete action to reach the tipping point in the transition from closed to open research information, and the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information is open for signature by all organizations that carry out, fund, and evaluate research to support this transition.

If you want to learn more about the Barcelona Declaration, join us in the launch webinar on April 23, 1.00-2.30pm CEST. Click here to register for the webinar.

You can also keep yourself up to date by following the Barcelona Declaration’s social media channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/barcelona-declaration/

Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@BarcelonaDORI

X: https://x.com/BarcelonaDORI

OpenCitations is part of the CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment (OI4RRA)

Last March, the  Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) launched its call for members to propose Working Groups and National Chapters. The aim of the call (which was closed in June) was to foster the creation of Working Groups that would work as ‘communities of practice’ to enable systemic reform of research assessment by providing mutual learning and collaboration on specific thematic areas.

A group of 23 Coalition members, including University of Bologna’s personnel working at OpenCitations, collaborated in designing and proposing the CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment (OI4RRA), focusing on having open infrastructures for making research assessment more transparent and responsible, and thus enabling the research community to be in full control of the data and indicators it relies on in assessments.

We are now thrilled to announce that the proposed Working Group has been accepted, and will start its activities in the next months, with the mission to “enable institutions to move from proprietary infrastructure and research information, to open alternatives–in support of the transition to responsible research assessment practices. This effort will take into consideration the wide range of research outputs and open science practices and address the diversity of the global research community”.

The CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment will work to facilitate the use of existing open infrastructures, -, with the aim to make it possible a transition to a fully OI4RRA ecosystem – interconnected, decentralised and open – that is fit to serve existing and emerging needs of reformed RRA agendas.

For more information visit the dedicated section on CoARA’s website, and read the full list of participants in OI4RRA here.

OpenCitations is hiring: one-year Research Fellow position now open

OpenCitations is seeking applicants for a one-year Research Fellow position to be held from April 2023, for which the application closing deadline is 28 February 2023.

Currently, the amount and complexity of the data made available by OpenCitations opens up several issues related to the improvement, scalability and optimisation of its infrastructure. Therefore, it is crucial to study and customise recent approaches for managing Big Data to create a knowledge base to build decentralised, scalable, long-lasting and easily-customizable services.

The goal of the Research Fellowship is

to study the current limitations and possible improvements to introduce in the OpenCitations infrastructure
to reengineer the current infrastructure to make it more scalable, reliable, interoperable, reusable and distributed.

Thus, the Research Fellow is expected to address issues related to the provision of Web services, the management of distributed and heterogeneous databases and services, data conversion and ingestion processes, parallel computing and security. Particular attention will be given to data preservation and the long-term maintenance and update of the infrastructure.

Requirements

The minimal formal requirement for this position is a Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Science and Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering, Digital Humanities or equivalent.

Moreover, applicants are expected to have

sysadmin skills
computer programming skills
the ability to read, write and speak in good English

It is highly desirable for the applicants to have

demonstrable expertise in using and managing Linux servers (especially Debian and Raspbian), container orchestrator systems (e.g. Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code systems (e.g. Terraform), Web servers implementing FastGCI (especially lighttpd), graph databases (especially Blazegraph), Python programming and Python Web Application Frameworks (especially web.py and Flask), Git-based version-control systems (especially GitHub);
a strong and demonstrable commitment to open science
demonstrable knowledge of Semantic Web technologies, Linked Data and Web technologies

Teamwork abilities and a good knowledge of Italian would also be very beneficial.

How to apply

The Research Fellowship application (written either in Italian or in English) should minimally comprise the following:

a cover letter of application, motivating why the candidate is applying for this position;
a full Curriculum Vitae containing information about prior scientific and professional jobs and the scientific production of the candidate;
a public portfolio of software, projects and activities undertaken within the past ten years, with a clear indication of the applicant’s role in each.

The Call for Applications (in Italian and in English) is available online on the website of the University of Bologna. It also includes an attachment with a description of OpenCitations and of the activities related to the position. The position has a net salary (exempt from income tax, after deduction of social security contributions) in excess of 23K euros per year. As indicated in the Call for Applications, candidates need to apply exclusively through the University of Bologna web portal.

Two years of achievements within the ‘SCOSS family’ (and it’s not over yet!)

Posted on August 10th 2022 by Chiara Di Giambattista

← Previous post: The OpenCitations Roadmap is now publicly available on Trello

→ Next post: New documents that present OpenCitations’ mission, unique benefits, present status and future plans

In March, The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) celebrated, together with the generous funders and the projects involved (including OpenCitations), the achievement of an amazing milestone: a total of 4 million Euros raised so far for supporting the growth and development of Open Science Infrastructures. This significant sum is not just a number, but a concrete sign of the commitment of numerous institutions all over the world to ensure the success of vital organs of the Open Science ecosystem. Thanks to the pledges recently made, the new infrastructures selected for the third SCOSS pledging round have now started developing their services and can now look to the future with more surety.

At the end of 2019, OpenCitations was selected by SCOSS for its second pledging round, and since then much progress has been made. As the OpenCitations’ founder and director David Shotton recently stated:

“OpenCitations is growing, thanks to the generous support from our members and donors, and we thank SCOSS sincerely for bringing us into contact with them. The citation coverage provided by OpenCitations is now approaching parity with that of the leading commercial citation indexes, and our ambition, within the next five years, is for OpenCitations to be routinely used by our worldwide stakeholders as their primary source of comprehensive scholarly citation information”.

In 2020, OpenCitations monitored the achievements of the first year of SCOSS support and shared the most important updates in a blog post. After a review from SCOSS Advisory Group and the SCOSS Board, the OpenCitations 2021 report to SCOSS is now available in the SCOSS May newsletter. We’re proud of the successful developments that 2021 brought with it in many areas, from the technical enhancements to OpenCitations to its new supporters and partnerships.

After a two-year-long collaboration, we in OpenCitations recognise that one of the most precious benefits of being part of SCOSS is working within a community: SCOSS not only provides a framework but also a real family of supportive institutions that support the Infrastructures during their growth and provide a safety net if troubles occur along the path. The bi-monthly meetings organized by the SCOSS team enable dialogue with the other infrastructures within the same pledging round, while presentation and promotion to the institutions worldwide are fostered by participation in webinars and conferences. During 2021, OpenCitations participated in 16 events, and in 5 of them (LIBER Webinar 2021, JISC Webinar 2021, LIBER Annual Conference 2021, Open Science Fair 2021, and Open Access Tage 2021) OpenCitations’ director Silvio Peroni gave talks together with the representatives of others infrastructures involved in the SCOSS second pledging round.

In compliance with the POSI principles, SCOSS encouraged OpenCitations to set up an open governance structure. As described here, the organizational bodies included in the OpenCitations present governance are three: the Directors, the International Advisory Board, and the Council. Although executive power is still currently vested in the hands of the Directors, in the last two years the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, a committee that now comprises nine Open Science experts from different professional and academic backgrounds, has had a crucial role in guiding the OpenCitations activities, and it is now working on strategic developments in terms of collaborations, policies, support and governance. Moreover, last December OpenCitations organized a Webinar in conjunction with its Annual Meeting to present and discuss with the OpenCitations Council members OpenCitations’ recent developments and future plans.

OpenCitations is highly reliant upon the connections we have created and on people working together: thanks to the support we received throughout the last two years, the OpenCitations team has grown and now includes six people employed by the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna, the administrative body for OpenCitations. Besides the previously announced appointments of Claudio Fabbri (Research Manager), Chiara Di Giambattista (Communications Director and Community Development Manager), Giuseppe Grieco (Software and Systems Developer), and Arcangelo Massari (Software Developer, working within the OpenAIRE-Nexus project), early in 2022 Ivan Heibi, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bologna, joined OpenCitations with responsibility for the technical infrastructure, and Arianna Moretti, who recently graduated in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge, joined as a software developer. This enlarged team, involving young and motivated researchers, is working on numerous projects to be announced later in 2022. You can learn more about OpenCitations’ ongoing activities on our public roadmap.

OpenCitations’ aim continues to be the publication of open data describing the bibliographic citations linking global scholarly publications, with depth and scope, while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy and provenance. Most importantly, OpenCitations services will always be free, making global scholarly citation data available at zero cost and without restriction for third party analysis and re-use.

With its support, SCOSS has been helping OpenCitations to pursue its mission and spread the benefits of Open Science. However, 2022 will be the last year of the three-year-long support ensured by SCOSS. OpenCitations activities won’t stop in 2023 — indeed there still are many long-planned activities that we hope to initiate in the near future, given sufficient resources. This is why OpenCitations requires ongoing support from the scholarly community. All the information you may require to start helping us financially is available on the OpenCitations website: https://opencitations.net/membership

By supporting OpenCitations, you will embrace and sustain the ideals and vision of Open Science, and you will help in creating a more open, democratic and fair knowledge environment.

OpenCitations and EC funding: OpenAIRE Nexus and RISIS2

The incentives for new OpenCitations innovative solutions

Two years ago, in their canonical 2020 QSS paper on OpenCitations, Silvio Peroni and David Shotton anticipated the creation of the new database, OpenCitations Meta, able to “offer a faster and richer service” by storing bibliographic metadata “in house”. Meta would “avoid duplication of data by efficiently permitting us to keep […] a single copy of the metadata for each of the bibliographic entities involved as citing or cited entities in the different OpenCitations’ citation indexes”, would remove the requirement for potentially slow API calls to external metadata sources such as Crossref and ORCID, and would enable us to index citations involving entities lacking DOIs.

Important synergies to achieve goals

Today, thanks to the recent involvement of OpenCitations in two EC-funded projects, the OpenAIRE-Nexus Project (Horizon 2020 EU funded project, GA: 101017452) and the RISIS2 Project (Horizon 2020 EU funded project, GA: 824091), the development of OpenCitations Meta has commenced, with a planned release date later in 2022.

The OpenAIRE-Nexus project started in January 2021 to embrace and expand the operation of a portfolio of thirteen services, provided by OpenAIRE infrastructure, public institutions, organisations and universities, classified into three portfolios entitled PUBLISH, MONITOR, and DISCOVER. The OpenAIRE-Nexus portfolios focus on the demands of the three main categories of the research lifecycle. Therefore, OpenAIRE-Nexus makes sure such services are integrated to provide a uniform Open Science Scholarly Communication package for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Within the OpenAIRE Nexus project there is scope for producing not only support materials (factsheet, guides, video tutorials, demos) but also training sessions where the services in the three portfolios will be showcased, anticipating the EOSC onboarding process. The role of OpenCitations in the project is to provide open bibliographic citations, and interconnect and integrate (and vice versa) functionalities with the OpenAIRE Research Graph and more OpenAIRE-Nexus services such as EpiSciences, OpenAIRE MONITOR) the core component of OpenAIRE infrastructure and services and of the EOSC Resource Catalogue.

Additionally, we are happy to announce our recent involvement in the RISIS2 Project. The Research Infrastructure for Science and Innovation Policy Studies (RISIS) is a project funded by the European Union under a Horizon2020 Research and Innovation Programme. RISIS2 involves 18 partners working together to create and maintain a research infrastructure for the field of Science, Technology, and Industry (STI) Studies, and to build an advanced research community in this field. OpenCitations’ contributions to RISIS2 will include not only the creation of OpenCitations Meta but also the development of a new citation index of open references, the OpenCitations Index of DataCite Open Citations (DOCI), which will be based on the open reference holdings of DataCite and, together with COCI, will be cross-searchable through our unified OpenCitations API.

Lessons learnt so far

A year into the OpenAIRE-Nexus project, we have found that one of the most significant benefits for OpenCitations is our involvement with this wide cooperative network of European research infrastructures, services, and communities, within which we can exchange experiences, ideas, and knowledge, and discuss any challenges and outcomes with our colleagues. More importantly, OpenCitations becomes positioned within the Open Science ecosystem, as a valuable innovative infrastructure with strong proof of integration and interoperable operations. Being part of the OpenAIRE-Nexus team has opened up more future challenges and expectations, and raised the bar for the inclusion of more functionalities of value. Thanks to the dedication of its efficient communication team, OpenAIRE is also helping us by communicating OpenCitations services to additional users and stakeholders, by inclusion within the comprehensive OpenAIRE services catalogue, by releasing an OpenCitations factsheet and by permitting us to present the latest information on OpenCitations through established events (i.e. Open Science FAIR 2022). FAIR and openness of information is our motto, and we strongly promote this through all our activities.

Expanding our team

As announced in our previous blog post “Five reasons why 2021 has been a great year for OpenCitations”, the support we receive from the EU as part of OpenAIRE-Nexus has enabled our recent appointment of Arcangelo Massari, a software developer who is now playing a crucial role in the creation and development of OpenCitations Meta.

As the year 2022 progresses, we look forward to bringing you further information about other new goals for OpenCitations, made possible by the support we receive from our numerous partnerships.

California Digital Library invests in OpenCitations

OpenCitations is excited to announce that the California Digital Library (CDL) has joined our growing list of contributors.

CDL’s commitment to sustainable open scholarship has great value for the global scholarly community. Through its investments and partnerships, CDL aims to create an international academic and librarian dialogue, trusting in the idea that “the university, its scholars and its libraries thrive when we transcend organizational boundaries and commit ourselves to shared investments”.

CDL’s contribution will generously support OpenCitations throughout 2021-2023. CDL funding in the fiscal year 2020-2021 also includes two other SCOSS-endorsed infrastructures, OAPEN and DOAB, the non-profit organization Open Access Switchboard, and the services PsyArXiv and SCOAP3 Books. As can be read in the recent post by Ellen Finnie, this investment reflects CDL’s “commitment to ’invest in open’ by allocating a portion of our collections funding to the development of open content and infrastructure in support of UC scholarship and teaching”.

OpenCitations team is grateful to be included in CDL’s ongoing investment in open infrastructure. Thank you!

OpenCitations’ compliance with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure

What should an open scholarly infrastructure look like?

An answer to this tough question can be found in the original February 2015 blog post by Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin and Cameron Neylon

Bilder G., Lin J., Neylon C. (2015) Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure , http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859

and in the summary of the principles to be found as:

Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2020), The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.24343/C34W2H :

“Infrastructure at its best is invisible. We tend to only notice it when it fails. If successful, it is stable and sustainable. Above all, it is trusted and relied on by the broad community it serves. Trust must run strongly across each of the following areas: running the infrastructure (governance), funding it (sustainability), and preserving community ownership of it (insurance)”.

These areas are fully define the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), which provide a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organizations and initiatives that support the research community can be run and sustained.

As far as we are aware, Crossref was the first infrastructure to publish its compliance with POSI, detailed in Geoffrey Bilder’s December 2020 blog post

Crossref’s Board votes to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure.

OpenCitations too espouses POSI and, in January 2021, we monitored the extent of our own compliance with POSI, the results of which are shown in the following diagram.

Governance

●	Coverage across the research enterprise	We gather citations from global scholarship
●	Stakeholder governed	Advisory board currently lacks executive power and is not elected
●	Non-discriminatory membership	Membership open to all those espousing open science
●	Transparent operations	Everything is open
●	Cannot lobby	OpenCitations lobbies to achieve open scholarly citations and bibliographic metadata; it does not engage in political or financial lobbying
●	Living will	Since all our data open, others can recreate our service
●	Formal incentives to fulfill mission & wind-down	No formal plan for wind-down has yet been drawn up

Sustainability

●	Time-limited funds used only for time-limited activities	Grant income should be used solely for grantprojects
●	Goal to generate surplus	Goal not yet realized – income so far too limited
●	Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months	Goal not yet realized – income so far too limited
●	Mission-consistent revenue generation	Membership fees and solicited donations
●	Revenue based on services, not data	All data and services freely given to community, and thus do not generate income

Insurance

●	Open source	All software under open source licenses
●	Open data	All data available under CC0 waiver
●	Available data	All data available via REST APIs, SPARQL endpoints, query interfaces and data dumps
●	Patent non-assertion	We will not patent anything: OpenCitations’ infrastructure is free to replicate

We at OpenCitations are proud of the results reached in the Insurance area, but realise that we still have some was to go in the other areas. Although the general situation is already satisfying, we are working to strengthen our weak points.

OpenCitations at LIBER Annual Conference 2021: ‘How Can Open Infrastructures Support the Role of Research Libraries?’

For the second year, OpenCitations has taken part in the LIBER annual conference. LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries) is a network that gathers 440 research libraries, based in more than 40 countries all over the world, with the mission of supporting Europe’s research libraries by highlighting their value to policymakers, providing resources and training, and forming valuable partnerships.

Since 1951, the LIBER Annual Conference is a key event for the entire network, a keenly anticipated meeting for research library professionals whose mission is “to identify the most pressing needs for research libraries, and to share information and ideas for addressing those needs”. Due to the ongoing pandemic restrictions, the 50^th LIBER meeting (23-25 June 2021) was held online, as was the 2020 meeting, with digital co-hosting by the University of Belgrade Library in Serbia. The online-showcase format, however, didn’t constrain the creation of a vital virtual square, fostered by the voices of 70 speakers. The main theme of the conference, “Libraries and Open Knowledge: from vision to implementation” was deepened in 12 parallel sessions.

Professor Silvio Peroni, Director of OpenCitations, participated in Session #5 ‘How Can Open Infrastructures Support the Role of Research Libraries?’ with a presentation dedicated to the benefits of Open Infrastructures for libraries, dialoguing with James MacGregor (interim Managing Director of the Public Knowledge Project), Joanna Ball (Head of Roskilde University Library), and Niels Stern (director of OAPEN and co-Director of DOAB).

The session, chaired by Maaike Napolitano (National Library of the Netherlands) opened with a presentation by Fidan Limani (Research assistant at ZBW– Leibniz Information Centre for Economics) about the integration of scholarly artifacts from the domain of economics using Knowledge Graphs (KG), and the creation of a network of entities describing objects of interest and connections, while keeping a library perspective. The use of citation links connecting datasets and citations, and the adoption of ontologies and data exportation in RDF would facilitate a possible beneficial collaboration between ZBW and Open Infrastructures such as OpenCitations (whose data is itself in the form of a Knowledge Graph).

OpenCitations also shares some common features with the other Open Infrastructures described in the second presentation: the financial support from SCOSS project; the community-based approach; and their promising value for libraries and the entire scholarly community.

OpenCitations is an independent not-for-profit infrastructure organization dedicated to open scholarship and the publication of open bibliographic and citation data by the use of Semantic Web (Linked Open Data) technologies, engaged in advocacy for open citations and open bibliographic metadata, as a founding member of both the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA). It provides data containing more than 7 hundred million citations that the community can use for any purpose. Such data can be crucial as a vehicle for use in national and international research evaluation exercises to make such activities more transparent and reproducible as compared to other proprietary services. Librarians can use OC citation data (e.g., via our REST API) to enhance or develop tools to support their authors, researchers, students, institutional administrators in different kind of contests, for instance by providing metrics to monitor research at your institution and by improving the discoverability of research products such as publications and data.

OAPEN is a no-profit foundation dedicated to increase the discoverability of open access books and trust around them. They are running three Open-Source platforms enabling open access to books: the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) – a freely available basic indexing service easy integrable within library catalogues; OAPEN Library – a publication platform dedicated to hosting, preserving and distributing books; OAPEN OA Books Toolkit – public information resource for authors to build trust around open-access books.

PKP (Public Knowledge Project) is a software and library project, consisting of three applications (Open Journal System, Open Pre-printer System and Open Monograph Press).

The dialogue during this LIBER session wasn’t a mere presentation of these projects and their technical properties: the speakers emphasized the importance of ensuring the participation and the engagement of the stakeholder community, pointed out the crucial value of the support received – not only financial – from Research Libraries, and discussed how such Open Infrastructures can be beneficial for libraries.

How can libraries support Open Infrastructures? And what role do they play in a long-term solution? According to Joanna Ball, from a librarian perspective, it’s not only a who-benefits-whom problem, but it’s more about finding a “third way, about developing mutually beneficial partnerships, and going beyond the traditional way of approaching things so that we can really play to each other’s strengths.”

This approach is fully aligned with OpenCitations’ intentions. As Silvio Peroni underlined, in most of cases the active collaboration between Open Infrastructures and libraries is not only about the financial support, but in cooperatively reach a common goal. In particular, “if infrastructures like OpenCitations provide appropriate and easy-to-use interfaces and tools that allow librarians to contribute appropriate bibliographic metadata, and if librarians are willing to enter such metadata from their own records, libraries may become a significant reliable source of this kind of information”. The result of such a ‘crowd-sourced’ entry of bibliographic metadata by libraries would be an enrichment of the overall global open knowledge graph made available through citational links.

In the last presentation, dedicated to two services provided by OPERAS, Emilie Blotière, (CNRS) and Tiziana Lombardo (Net7) reiterated the value of scholarly communication. COESO and GO TRIPLE, funded by the European Commission, aim in fact to create a persistent dialogue in the Social Sciences and Humanities community, by tackling the fragmentation and becoming a meeting point among different communities.

What emerged from the session is the importance of communication, cooperation and networking between Open Infrastructures and Libraries, and this is a message that perfectly matches with the core values of LIBER, collaboration and inclusivity. The next LIBER annual conference is scheduled for June 2022 in Odense, hopefully recreating the physical and enthusiastic gathering of the previous meetings.

You can find the recording of the full session here: LIBER 2021 Session #5: How Can Open Infrastructures Support the Role of Research Libraries?

You can find the slides of the session on Zenodo.

OpenCitations and SCOSS: one year of support

At the end of 2019, OpenCitations was selected by The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Service (SCOSS) 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). Since 2017, SCOSS has been helping identify non-commercial services essential to Open Science, and making recommendations that these services should be considered for funding support by the global OA/OS community of stakeholders (academic institutions and their libraries, research institutes, publishers, funding organisations, national and regional governments, international organisations, learned societies and service providers worldwide, and everyone who is invested in Open Access and Open Science).

Since OpenCitations is not-for-profit and all our data and services are free, the relationship with SCOSS is crucial in maintaining and developing OpenCitations’ infrastructure and continuing to make our data and service freely available.

Thanks to the renewed engagement and support from the OA/OS Community, 2020 has been a year of great achievements for OpenCitations.

As first described here, the starting point has been the set-up of an initial open governance structure. For administrative convenience, OpenCitations is managed by the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna. Currently, the organizational bodies included in the OpenCitations governance are three: the Directors, the International Advisory Board, and the Council. All these bodies are regulated and described in two documents, “Organizational Bodies and Finances”, and “Rules for Membership” that specifically describes the criteria for Membership of OpenCitations.

The generous support received from OpenCitations’ donors and members during 2020 is making it possible to pay for necessary services and the salaries of personnel to support the daily activities of OpenCitations, thus enhancing the administration of OpenCitations and communication with new supporters and collaborators.

Separately, the involvement of OpenCitations in different funding applications throughout 2020 has led to the successful development of two projects.

The first one, OpenAIRE Nexus, started on 1 January 2021 with the aim to create a framework of services for assisting in publishing research, monitoring its impact, helping promote its discovery, and integrating it into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) for the benefit of the open science community worldwide. OpenCitations’ role in this will be to provide open bibliographic citations as part of the open data components of OpenAIRE and the EOSC.

The second project, the Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus, funded by the Wellcome Trust from July 2019 to December 2020, had the aim to expand the types of citation data provided by OpenCitations to include information about each individual in-text reference and its semantic context. This makes it possible, for example, to distinguish references that are cited only once from those that are cited multiple times, to see which references are cited together (e.g. in the same sentence), to determine in which section of the article references are cited (e.g. Introduction, Methods), and to specify the textual context of each citation, thus potentially making it possible to determine the function of the citation. Part of the grant received for this project was used to cover the salaries and expenses of developers who worked on the creation of a new persistent identifier (PID) for in-text reference pointers, the In-Text Reference Pointer Identifier (InTRePID) first described here, in the release of the new version of the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM), and the creation of a new database, the Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus (CCC) containing the metadata describing the in-text references that we processed, drawn from the open biomedical literature.

Through its projects, OpenCitations has strengthened its connections with data of topical urgency. A relevant and timely output, for instance, was the creation of the Coronavirus Open Citations Dataset, which contains (as of 16 May 2020) information about 189,697 citations and about the 49,719 citing or cited articles involved in these citations related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The involvement of OpenCitations in the SCOSS community has included our participation to several SCOSS-related events (amongst others, the SCOSS Webinar for the Couperin Consortium, the JROST Conference 2020), and the Jisc Webinar Sustaining the future of key open research infrastructure services (SCOSS) in order to present OpenCitations to the OA/OS community, together with the other Open Infrastructures selected in the first and second funding cycles. In addition, during 2020 OpenCitations participated in several international conferences, talks and meetups, including PIDapalooza 2020 and the International Semantic Web Conference 2020, and organized and co-hosted the Workshop on Open Citations and Scholarly Metadata 2020 (September 2020), gathering scholars, policy makers, publishers, and open scholarly data advocates.

Being part of the SCOSS network during 2020 has been an enriching and stimulating opportunity. The support of the international coalition for Open Science has resulted in a massive interest from European governments and Institutions (including the French Government through its National Plan for Open Science, the AgroParisTech, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Royal Danish Library), and the involvement of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network and the Council of Australian University Librarians. So far, 2021 seems to be equally promising, as judged by the increasing support being shown by US consortia for open infrastructures. Between May 2020 and April 2021 the US was responsible for 19% of the traffic to OpenCitations services, and every month has been listed in the top 4 countries using our data.

Despite the enthusiastic results, there’s still much to be done: 2020 was the first year of a three-year-long collaborative journey, in which OpenCitations will be moving forward with SCOSS to create an open, secured and inclusive future for science and research.