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OpenCitations has been awarded the Certificate of Excellence in Research Infrastructure Leadership

On 8 May 2026, during the Graduation Ceremony of the Executive Masters in Management of Research Infrastructures (EMMRI), OpenCitations was awarded the Certificate of Excellence in Research Infrastructure Leadership. This recognition was achieved through the participation of members of the OpenCitations team in the 2024–2026 class of the Excellence Programme for Research Infrastructures, an initiative designed to support research infrastructures in developing organisational competencies across their teams, fostering sustainable and effective leadership models.

The OpenCitations participants included Director Silvio Peroni, CTO Ivan Heibi, Research Manager Claudio Fabbri, Systems Administrator Mario Petrella, and Communications Director Chiara Di Giambattista, who took part in the 11 modules of the programme. Across these modules, OpenCitations built a network of relationships and exchanges with other selected research infrastructures and strengthened its competencies in the following areas:

  • Governance and organisation
  • Developing a sustainable funding model for RIs
  • International law and compliance
  • Financial management
  • Raising awareness
  • Leadership and team building
  • Service provision
  • Infrastructure and resource management
  • Strategic management of RIs
  • Business development and innovation in the RI context

The graduation ceremony, the final step of this two-year journey, brought together faculty members and representatives from the research infrastructures. Among the reflections shared during the event, one phrase captured the spirit of the programme: “Leadership is a form of enthusiasm”. Indeed, this experience made it clear that such enthusiasm was widely shared among participants, including colleagues from different infrastructures worldwide. The exchange of perspectives promoted throughout each module of the programme fostered a more grounded and pragmatic understanding of how research infrastructures evolve and collaborate in an international environment.

We would like to thank the EMMRI team, in particular the Director Professor Marialuisa Lavritrano, and Professor Enrico Guarini and Drs. Laura Farina, for selecting OpenCitations for this programme and for developing an initiative that is both well-structured and internationally relevant, hosted at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

At the end of this programme, OpenCitations carries forward the responsibility to build on the stimulating discussions and insights gained throughout the course. We will work to further develop the competencies acquired and reflect on both the strengths and limitations identified through this exchange, to continue supporting the long-term sustainability and development of OpenCitations as an open scholarly infrastructure

OpenCitations receives the Open Publishing Award in Open Data

What role does ‘open’ play in making this project special?”

This apparently easy, but not banal, question was asked in the Open Publishing Awards nomination form, and at OpenCitations we prefaced our answer to it by stating “For OpenCitations, ‘open’ is the crucial value and the final purpose.” We consider the free availability of bibliographic citation data to be a necessary condition for the establishment of an open knowledge graph, and believe that having citations open helps achieve a more transparent, accessible and comprehensive research practice.

Since 2019, the Open Publishing Awards, founded and organized by the Coko Foundation and sponsored by OASPA, Crossref and Cloud68.Co, “celebrate software and content in publishing that use open licenses but also, importantly, provide a chance to reflect on the strategic value of openness”. The award judges considered open access projects divided into five categories: Open Publishing Lifetime Contribution, Open Content, Open Publishing Models, Open Source Software and Open Data.

It is in this final Open Data category of the Open Publishing Awardsthat OpenCitations was selected, as an infrastructure that perfectly represents the open principles, from among the few semantic web and linked open data initiatives currently available in the scholarly communication landscape. The award was announced in the Open Publishing Awards Ceremony, during the closing session of the FORCE2021 conference “Joining Forces to Advance the Future of Research Communication” (7-9 December). You can learn more about the Awards and the other projects selected here: https://openpublishingawards.org/results/2021/index.html

The greatest honour for OpenCitations was receiving the following comment given on behalf of the jury panel, which included open source and scholarly communication experts:

“At the time of writing this review, the largest database provided by OpenCitations contains more than 1.23 billion citations. Compiling this database in a license-friendly way is a feat on its own, but combine that with OpenCitations’ persistence (established 11 years ago), their active and consistent involvement with the community, and the number of works that were made possible by their effort (Google Scholar lists 1440 results), it is clear that OpenCitations is one of the fundamental projects in open publishing, specifically in open scientific publishing”.

We are proud and humbled to count the Open Publishing Award in Open Data among the acknowledgements so far received by OpenCitations. Despite the term “award”, the Open Publishing Awards, in fact, don’t aim to proclaim winners, but rather to “shake the hands” of some projects which seem to be following (and tracing) a right path towards a more open knowledge. All the projects awarded help by defining more concretely what “open”means, and at the same time their example encourages awareness on the variety of the open publishing projects, and a reflection about the common values and goals that gather so many different people, institutions and organizations.

Recognizing the commitment to the openness of knowledge and research of the not-for-profit and collaborative projects like OpenCitations is about community, not competition.

As Silvio recently stated:

OpenCitations is a plural. Together, we are OpenCitations.”