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Wheels Are in Motion: OpenCitations’ progress in 2024

January is a strange month. After the festive whirl of December’s gatherings, it quickly shifts into the hustle and bustle of the new year’s commitments and the work that follows the holidays. For us at OpenCitations, however, it has become a tradition to take a moment at the end of this month to pause after the first hectic weeks of the year. This time allows us to reflect on the achievements of the past year and plan for the future with a clearer mind.  

2024 has been a transitional year, one where we’ve worked “in the shadows”, focusing on a series of behind-the-scenes improvements that will transform the OpenCitations experience for our users and services. Over the past few years, we have gathered valuable feedback from our community and have taken it to heart, using it to inform the enhancements to our infrastructure. These changes will be rolled out in the coming months of 2025, and we are excited to share a glimpse of what’s to come.

1. Strengthening the Foundations of the Technical Infrastructure

We closed out 2023 by announcing the redesign of our technical infrastructure, a crucial step for better managing OpenCitations’ data sources. This shift was necessary to enhance the efficiency of our processes and ensure scalability for the future. In particular, in recent months, our development team has been focused on addressing issues within OpenCitations Meta, to enable to set up again the usual bimonthly updates from one of our main data sources (i.e. Crossref). This work is essential to guarantee the timely release of the OpenCitations Index. 

We were happy to announce the July 2024 release of the Index, containing more than 2 billion citations, but we are now working to ensure that the release frequency is consistent throughout 2025. Our focus will be on maintaining a steady pace, ensuring regular updates, and improving the overall reliability of our data.

2.A Tool for Data Curation: HERITRACE

In addition to infrastructure improvements, we have been developing a new tool designed to streamline data curation: HERITRACE. This semantic data management system is tailored specifically for the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector. HERITRACE serves as an editor for curating bibliographic data, allowing users to track provenance and monitor changes over time. 

It has been tested in a small-scale project with a specific dataset, and early results have been promising. HERITRACE is designed to be user-friendly, offering non-technical users a seamless experience while providing an efficient administrative interface for technical staff. In comparison to other established platforms such as OmekaS, Semantic MediaWiki, Research Space, and CLEF, it stands out for its ease of use, provenance management, change tracking, and customization options. 

HERITRACE is built upon SHACL for data modeling and integrates the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM) for tracking provenance and changes. Looking ahead, we plan to expand its capabilities with the integration of a robust authentication system and broader data compatibility through the RDF Mapping Language (RML), making it an even more powerful tool for digital heritage management. 

In the context of OpenCitations, the goal is to use HERITRACE to enable curating bibliographic metadata and citation data by expert users (e.g. librarians), aiming at increasing the quality of the data OpenCitations provides. 

In the video below, our developer Arcangelo Massari provides a quick overview and tutorial of HERITRACE:

 

3.New and Ongoing Collaborations

During 2024, we have honoured the aspects of our mission statement describing community engagement as a core point in OpenCitations’ activities. These partnerships are vital to advancing OpenCitations’ purposes and goals, and we look forward to continuing the collective work into 2025. In particular, we expanded the network of partnerships and released some outcomes of previous collaborations:  

  • Our project within the European Research Council (2023-2024) dedicated to the mapping of metadata collections between OpenCitations Meta and OpenAlex, has concluded. The full analysis is presented in the following article involving OpenCitations Developer Elia Rizzetto:  

Rizzetto, E.; Peroni, S., Mapping bibliographic metadata collections: the case of OpenCitations Meta and OpenAlex, in: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS, «CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS», 2024, 3643, pp. 155 – 168 (Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Information and Research Science Connecting to Digital and Library Science, IRCDL 2024, Bressanone – Brixen, Italia, 2024)  

  • January 2025 has formally marked the beginning of two new exciting projects in collaboration with OPERAS and other institutional and industrial partners, building upon our previous work together within the GraspOS Project. During 2024, it’s been inspiring being involved in the work packages of the project, where we have kept collaborating with our colleagues from OpenAIRE. Also, GraspOS is doing a terrific job in the promotion of the news and initiatives of its community, through its newsletter, and its blog (where you can also find an exclusive interview with our Director and one with our Head of Comms – hi, it’s me!), so we suggest you subscribe and follow if interested in the theme of Open Science and Responsible Research Assessment.
  • In April, we were included in Infra Finder, a tool developed by Invest in Open Infrastructure to foster discovery, adoption, and investment in open infrastructure services. The intuitive interface and usability make Infra Finder a helpful tool that could make OpenCitations and other infrastructure services more visible to a wider and diverse community. 
  • We continued our participation in the SCOSS Family, the community of practice gathering the Infrastructures from SCOSS six pledging rounds, and we are now part of the internal working groups aimed at exploring ways of collaboration, sharing resources, creating impact and contributing to creating a stronger open ecosystem.  
  • Lastly, OpenCitations is proud to be one of the supporters of the Barcelona Declaration, a key initiative launched in April 2024 aimed at fostering open access to scholarly information and advancing the principles of open science. This aligns perfectly with OpenCitations’ mission to promote transparency, accessibility, and collaboration in scholarly communication. By supporting the Barcelona Declaration, we reaffirm our commitment to the shared values of openness, inclusivity, and the democratization of knowledge, all of which are integral to creating a more equitable and accessible academic landscape for researchers, institutions, and the global community.  

4.Welcome and Farewell

Alongside the growth of our network, the OpenCitations team has also expanded, now counting 11 collaborators, including Research Fellows and PhD students, with the addition of Ivan Heibi as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Mario Petrella as Systems Administrator. 

Besides the enrichment brought in by our new colleagues, 2024 also brought a great loss. The founder and director of OpenCitations, David Shotton, passed away in May, leaving not only an institutional but, most of all, a human void, as a mentor and guide. We wanted to remember him in this blog post, which aims to serve as a virtual wall of tribute, constantly evolving, where anyone wishing to share a thought for David can do so by sending an email to comms@opencitations.net.  

5.Renewal of the International Advisory Board for OpenCitations

After four years of prolific collaboration, the end of 2024 also marked the conclusion of our International Advisory Board’s first term. We’d like to extend our deepest gratitude to the former members for their invaluable insights and guidance throughout their tenure. Looking ahead, we are thrilled of the new members who have decided to put their expertise at OpenCitations’ service, and we can’t wait to begin working closely with them in 2025.

6.Some Spoilers for 2025

As we close out this year’s reflections, we’re also looking ahead to 2025. In this upcoming year, we will begin to see the fruits of our work from 2024. We are committed to continuously improving our offerings and services for our users and the community that supports us. We exist because of them, and we are here to serve their needs. 

In the coming weeks, you will also notice some exciting changes: OpenCitations will be undergoing a rebranding, along with updates designed to make our virtual presence more engaging and user-friendly. We’ve heard feedback about how challenging it can sometimes be to navigate our information, and we’re eager to make improvements that will help our users find what they need more easily. 

Finally, we invite all our readers to participate in the 5th Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC), which will be held in Bologna on May 28-29, 2025. WOOC aims to gather anyone interested in the widespread adoption of practices for creation, sharing, reuse and improvement of open scholarly metadata. This year’s edition of the workshop will be a special one, gravitating around the following theme: “Open Access of Research Information”. 

In particular, the first day will be dedicated to the Bologna Meeting on Open Research Information, to encourage discussion between the signatories and supporters of the Barcelona Declaration and other interested bodies and collaboratively orient the common roadmap, thus allowing the articulation of the outcomes that have recently been discussed during the Paris Conference on Open Research Information. 

The second day will be dedicated to invited contributions, presentations and a poster session selected among the participants for the call for contributions on the workshop theme. 

While the submission period for contributions is closing tomorrow, January 31 (h.23:59 AoE), there will still be opportunities to register as participants after the deadline, at the following link: https://forms.gle/Z7J36XSdPa9tkSop7. Please visit https://workshop-oc.github.io/ for all the information. We look forward to meeting you in Bologna! 

 

 

Looking back to look ahead: OpenCitations’ achievements in 2023

The first month of the new year has almost come to an end, and we at OpenCitations have dedicated these weeks after the holiday season to retrace the progress we reached as an open infrastructure throughout 2023, an activity that has become a tradition in the past few years. Looking back to the achievements has proven to be a great practice for our team not only to honour and celebrate the success, but also to visualize the points to focus on to best serve our community when planning future activities. During 2023 we have reached numerous milestones, which can be summarized under the two main topics: technical developments and new connections. 

Technical Developments

1. New sources

At the end of 2022, we had enriched our collection with two more sources, PubMed and DataCite, which were added to Crossref. During 2023 we completed the integration between OpenCitations and the OpenAIRE Graph as concerns open bibliographic and citation data, and in December we included the DOI-to-DOI citation links derived from the Japan Link Center (JaLC). As a result, by the end of 2023, OpenCitations counted almost 2 BILLION open citations available in its collection.

2. A brand-new workflow for an easier consultation

The progressive integration of new sources is one of OpenCitations’ main objectives. However, the recent source increase made it necessary to design a new ingestion workflow to facilitate their management. In November 2023 OpenCitations launched the new workflow, designed to produce just two comprehensive collections: OpenCitations Index, collecting open citation data, and OpenCitations Meta, containing open bibliographic metadata of citing and cited entities involved in citations. This evolution is making it simpler for OpenCitations users to consult the data maintained by our infrastructure without reducing the information content and accuracy.  

New connections 

3. A great event for the community

In October 2023, OpenCitations hosted the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2023 (WOOC 2023) in the historical location of the University of Bologna. After two online editions, it was exciting to meet in person the researchers, policy makers and service providers who in the past few years have collaborated with OpenCitations in many ways. For two days, almost 80 people from all around the world gathered to discuss the theme “The value of open scholarly metadata for Research Assessment purposes”. The event gave us a picture of a young and enthusiastic research community, aiming to collaborate among different countries to spread the message “Open Science is Better Science”. If you couldn’t attend the workshop, but are interested in the theme, you can find all the presentations from WOOC 2023 on Zenodo. Stay tuned on the WOOC X account and website, we will announce the 2025 edition later in 2024! 

4. New and old partnerships

OpenCitations’ main activities, besides the technical development, are tied to its participation in R&D and funded projects. Since 2019, we have started building a network of collaborations all around the world with institutions which share the same Open Science values. In 2023, our involvement in the SCOSS 2nd funding cycle has come to an end. In the last four years SCOSS has worked as an international showcase for OpenCitations, making it possible for us to get known by many institutions on an international level. We are now proud to keep on collaborating with SCOSS within the SCOSS Family network, a community of practice gathering all the OS infrastructure involved in the SCOSS funding cycles. During 2023, the SCOSS Family was involved in four internal sprints dedicated to planning four actions – collectively advocating the importance of open  infrastructure, communications kit for ‘the post-SCOSS phase’, collective self-assessment towards POSI, and map open science infrastructure ecosystem including SCOSS infrastructures – and the initial outcomes were presented in the Scoss Family Public Webinar 2023. The SCOSS family will continue its activities throughout 2024.

In 2023, we also celebrated the update of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), as a result of the work conducted since 2022 with the “POSI-Adopters” group to make the principles clearer and more inclusive. In June, the OpenAIRE-Nexus project, started back in 2021, formally came to an end, with the release of the index of citations from OpenAIRE. OpenCitations is part of the OpenAIRE Catalogue, which also links to the exhaustive and engaging materials we produced within the project. However, we continue to meet the familiar and friendly faces from the OpenAIRE team in the meetings of GraspOS, a project which started in January 2023 involving several European Open Science institutions, services and infrastructures. In GraspOS, OpenCitations is involved as one of the Data Asset Sources, which provides both the raw and the structured data that can be used to directly support OS-aware RRA processes or to calculate indicators or collect evidence that can be of value in these processes. The researchers from OpenCitations and the University of Bologna are contributing to GraspOS by developing a tool for the extraction of citation data from PDFs, enriched with additional information on the reasons for citing (because the citing entity reuses a method described in the cited entity, for agreeing with the claims of the cited entity, etc.) through the implementation of machine-learning systems. Also, together with GraspOS, OpenAIRE, and many other Coalition members, the OpenCitations personnel at the University of Bologna is among the participants of the CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment (OI4RRA), to work on enabling the research community to be in full control of the data and indicators it relies on in assessments. OpenCitations is always seeking interest from new institutions, and we are proud that our visibility is boasted by some reliable catalogues including the OpenAIRE catalogue, the EOSC Marketplace and, from 2023, also the JISC Catalogue. And soon you’ll find us in a new tool – stay tuned to find out!

5. Our way towards sustainability 

OpenCitations is increasingly gaining a prominent role in the community, establishing itself as a key player in changing research evaluation practices towards greater openness and equity. In recent years, OpenCitations has grown a lot both technically and in popularity, and for this we want to thank the number of members and donors who, even in the last year, have decided to support us and believe in our infrastructure. During 2023, our two Internal Working Groups “Governance Evolution” and “Community Building”, thanks to the participation of some members of the International Advisory Board for OpenCitations, reflected on the sustainability of OpenCitations, discussing strategies both at the management and communication level to ensure the integration of new actors into its subsistence. The groups will continue to meet throughout 2024, and some of the results will be released in the coming months. However, there is still a long way to go towards sustainability, and OpenCitations’ existence still relies on community funding, which is why OpenCitations still needs support: if you are looking for more information on why and how to support OpenCitations, you can read our recent call for action here. Thank you! 

6. Enlarging our team 

It is thanks to the support received that OpenCitations was able to develop its yearly activities, and we are happy to announce that in 2023 a new software developer, Elia Rizzetto, and a new PhD student, Francesca Cappelli, have joined our team to make this progress possible. The OpenCitations team now has a total of 12 members, including research fellows, PhD students, MA students, a Reseach Manager, an Assistant Professor and OpenCitations’ Directors. The number is expected to grow soon, as OpenCitations has recently released a call for the hiring of a System Administrator for technical infrastructure management.  

As can be seen from this brief (and detailed) report of some of the developments that have marked our 2023, OpenCitations is increasingly emerging as a community-based and community-guided infrastructure organization, in which there is an indissoluble link between technical progress and the network of people who guide the planning, work on implementation, and use or promote our services. Throughout 2024, OpenCitations aims to focus even more on harmonizing the relationship between the technical infrastructure and the community, developing more intuitive ways of accessing services and communications, and continuing to weave relationships with new research groups. We look forward to seeing what the year ahead will bring with it, and we hope you will continue to be with us.  

OpenCitations needs you: support the change in research practices

In OpenCitations, we like to define our infrastructure organization as “community-based” and “community-driven”, and we really mean it. The support coming from the number of academic libraries and consortia coming after OpenCitations’ involvement in the 2nd SCOSS funding cycle has made it possible, starting from 2020, to make OpenCitations develop from a small university project based on time-limited grant incomes to being an open infrastructure globally recognized for the provision of open citation data and bibliographical metadata. We want to thank all our members and donors, for trusting our mission and sustaining OpenCitations activities with their continuous and generous support, despite the pandemic and post-pandemic times. 

While retracing our work in the last three years, we are astonished by the achievements our team has accomplished, and by how in such a limited time frame OpenCitations has approached David Shotton’s initial vision (who is one of the co-directors of OpenCitations), when he first shaped the project back in 2010. Here are just some of the technical developments that have marked the last years:

  • in 2021, COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations crossed the threshold of one billion citations stored;
  • in 2022, we released the two new OpenCitations indexes of open citations, DOCI (citations from DataCite) and POCI (citations from PubMed);
  • we expanded our collection besides the citation data by releasing OpenCitations Meta, a database storing and delivering bibliographic metadata for all the publications in the OpenCitations Indexes, including the publication’s title, type, venue (e.g. journal name), volume number, issue number, page numbers, publication date, identifiers and details of the main actors involved in the document’s publication (the names of the authors, editors, and publishers); 
  • as of October 2023, OpenCitations Indexes contain information on 1.82 billion unique open citations. 

However, the most significant achievements for OpenCiations in the last years have been the creation of a prolific network of collaborations with other Open Science projects, such as OpenAIRE-Nexus, RISIS2 and GraspOS, and the establishment of a structured team, involving young researchers and PhD students, whose work at the University of Bologna has made it possible to work on the technical developments day by day. 

Our results are a strong indicator of the growing sensibility on the theme of the open provision of bibliographical metadata and citation data, of which Open Citations is at the forefront as a founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA). The effort and awareness campaigns led by these initiatives, by DORA and the Open Science community as a whole, have led more and more publishers to a change of heart and to open their reference lists. OpenCitations is an integral part of an ongoing process of transformation of the research environment, and we have collected and interpreted some of the needs of the academic community to plan our future activities and developments. We still need your help and support to make it possible to maintain and improve our infrastructure and to sustain the team working at OpenCitations

If you believe in

  • the importance of open bibliographic data for the creation of reproducible metrics for research assessment exercises
  • the power of the scholarly community to change existing practice by reclaiming ownership of its own data– and you want to become an active part of this change

please consider supporting OpenCitations either via membership or donation. You can find all the information on membership on our website at https://opencitations.net/membership, or you can ask for information by contacting us at membership@opencitations.net

Together, we can work to create an open and inclusive future for science and research. 

Thank You!

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. 

OpenCitations’ 2022: one year, numerous outcomes

2023 has arrived, and it’s the time to put aside the old agendas and to fill the freshly printed organizers with new tasks. However, it is also worth looking back over the achievements of the past year.

So, before consigning 2022 to the archives, we want to take a moment to recall and celebrate all that OpenCitations has achieved over the past year, in terms of technical developments, community building, and our own internal organization.

Clarifying our objectives

Since its foundation, OpenCitations has been presented to the scholarly community as a infrastructure organization guided by the values of openness, equity and accessibility. In 2022, we publicly clarified our mission, our aims and our unique points by publishing these three documents:

In addition, we continued to monitor OpenCitations’ compliance with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. Because one area in which we were still falling short involved stakeholder involvement in OpenCitations’ governance, in 2022 OpenCitations started reflecting on its organizational structure by creating a Governance Evolution Working Group. In addition, we explored the further development of our stakeholder community by establishing a parallel Community Building Working Group. These two small working groups, involving members of the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, will continue to meet throughout 2023 to develop strategic plans concerning OpenCitations open governance structure and outreach.

More people, more tools

In 2022, OpenCitations welcomed two new full-time developers to its team: Arianna Moretti as software developer, and Ivan Heibi as the person responsible for OpenCitations’ technical infrastructure. As of January 2023, the OpenCitations team consists of our two directors Silvio Peroni and David Shotton, our administrator and research manager Claudio Fabbri, myself as our communications director and community development manager, and our four developers: Giuseppe Grieco (software and systems developer), Arcangelo Massari (developer of OpenCitations Meta), Arianna Moretti (software and indexes developer), and Ivan Heibi (technical infrastructure manager). This team meets weekly at the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata within the University of Bologna.

This enlarged technical workforce has been crucial in the development of the two new OpenCitations indexes, DOCI (citations from DataCite) and POCI (citations from PubMed), and our new database of bibliographic metadata, OpenCitations Meta, all of which were released in December 2022:

  • DOCI, the OpenCitations Index of DataCite open DOI-to-DOI citations, is an RDF dataset containing details of all the citations that are specified in the most recent dump of DataCite metadata. The citations available in DOCI are treated as first-class data entities, with accompanying properties including the citations timespan, modelled according to the OpenCitations Data Model. Its first release (December 2022) contains information on 169,822,752 citations from 358,277 bibliographic resources.
  • POCI, the OpenCitations Index of PubMed open PMID-to-PMID citations, is an RDF dataset containing details of all the citations from publications bearing PubMed Identifiers (PMIDs) to other PMID-identified publications, harvested from the National Institutes of Health Open Citations Collection (NIH-OCC). As for DOCI, the citations available in POCI are treated as first-class data entities, with accompanying properties including the citations timespan, modelled according to the OpenCitations Data Model. Its first release contains 717,654,703 citations from 26,024,862 bibliographic resources.
  • OpenCitations Meta database stores and delivers bibliographic metadata for all the publications involved as citing or cited publications in the citations recorded in the OpenCitations Indexes. For each publication, the metadata exposed by OpenCitations Meta includes the publication’s title, type, venue (e.g. journal name), volume number, issue number, page numbers, publication date, and identifiers such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and PubMed Identifiers (PMIDs). In addition, OpenCitations Meta includes details of the main actors involved in the document’s publication, i.e., the names of the authors, editors, and publishers, each with its own additional metadata and identifier (e.g. ORCID). Its first release (December 2022) contains information on 87,321,593 bibliographic entities, 277,750,235 authors and 2,359,301 editors (counted by their roles, without disambiguating individuals), 710,226 publication venues, and 17,268 publishers.

As can be seen on OpenCitations roadmap, we have many tasks already scheduled for 2023, and for this reason OpenCitations team needs to expand further: we now seek applicants for a new Research Fellow position to work on the further development of the OpenCitations technical infrastructure from April 2023.

Our role in the community

Throughout 2022, the OpenCitations team has participated both online and in person in a number of international events, presenting details of OpenCitations to potential stakeholders and to Open Science experts, and connecting with similar organizations.

In October, OpenCitations organized our third workshop, the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2023, as a three-hour online event, to gather together and connect researchers, publishers and policy makers interested in the creation, reuse and improvement of open citation data and open scholarly metadata. The invited speakers provided a broad overview of the current state and future development of open bibliographic metadata and the scholarly record, and the role of OpenCitations in research assessment.

We have participated in two major European research and development project: In the context of the EC-funded project RISIS2 we released the new database OpenCitations Meta and the index DOCI, while within the OpenAIRE-Nexus project network we continue to provide open bibliographic citations as part of the open data components of OpenAIRE and the European Open Science Cloud. During 2022, the OpenAIRE team supported our activities in many areas, with a particular attention to communication and dissemination, as we explained in our blog post OpenCitations and EC funding: OpenAIRE Nexus and RISIS2.

The end of 2022 brought with it two new exciting collaborations that will be developed during the coming year: the inclusion of OpenCitations in the Jisc Collections, thereby permitting UK institutions to support OpenCitations through JISC; and our involvement in the GraspOS project (starting date January 1, 2023) as an open and trusted federated infrastructure for next-generation research metrics and indicators.

Continuing support

At OpenCitations we are deeply grateful to all our members and donors that have supported us financially so far, thus making it possible to enlarge our team, maintain our technical infrastructure, and work on our new data releases.

Much of our success has been due to our selection as an infrastructure worthy for inclusion in the SCOSS second pledging round in 2019. SCOSS helped us get in touch with a wider community, and enabled OpenCitations to have an increasingly significant role in the research environment. OpenCitations is now part of the SCOSS family, the community of all SCOSS-supported infrastructures, that provides a framework of mutual support for the the Infrastructures during their growth and a safety net should troubles occur along the path.

However, OpenCitations still has a long way to go along the path from being a sustainable open infrastructure to becoming a sustained open infrastructure providing reliable and invaluable services to our global stakeholder community. There are still 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 as our three-year period of SCOSS sponsorship draws to a close. All the information you may require to start helping us financially is available on the OpenCitations website: https://opencitations.net/membership.

2023 has just started. With your support, you can help us in making it an impactful year for OpenCitations and the Open Science community as a whole.

New documents that present OpenCitations’ mission, unique benefits, present status and future plans

Posted on August 10th 2022 by Chiara Di Giambattista

More than a year ago, Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member & Community Outreach for Crossref, and a valued member of the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, published on the Crossref blog the post “The road ahead: our strategy through 2025”. In order to describe all Crossref’s principles and activities, Ginny presented the Crossref strategic planning framework as a diagram summarizing Crossref’s statements, key messages and truths. The clarity and immediacy of the diagram were such that we adapted it to present  OpenCitations’ own statements and goals. The resulting poster “OpenCitations – what does the future hold?” was presented by our Director David Shotton at the OASPA2021 conference, and can be found in this blog post.

Although the poster offered a wide overview of OpenCitations values, unique traits, benefits and plans, it differed slightly from Ginny’s original diagram, in particular because it lacked a “Mission Statement”, scattering the relevant information within the “Values” and “Principles” boxes. Indeed, at that time (September 2021), we didn’t have a clearly defined Mission Statement.

Nevertheless, the creation of that poster was crucial in helping us start to articulate more clearly the purpose and meaning of OpenCitations. As David underlined in his post “From little acorns…a retrospective on OpenCitations”, since 2018 OpenCitations activities have progressively increased and, with them, the number of related journal articles, conference papers and technical definitions. OpenCitations’ involvement in international networks and collaborations (such as SCOSS and the OpenAIRE-Nexus project), together with our need of identifying and reaching out to new stakeholders to assure OpenCitations’ development and sustainability, has made it necessary to publicly define OpenCitations’ mission, unique strengths and next developmental steps.

After numerous revisions, aided by wise advice from members of the OpenCitations Advisory Board members, we’re now happy to publish the following three OpenCitations documents:

OpenCitations Mission Statement,

The Uniqueness of OpenCitations   and

OpenCitations – Present Status and Future Plans,

which together provide a summary of why we exist and where we are heading.

We are particularly proud of the definition of OpenCitations’ primary mission, namely

to harvest and openly publish accurate and comprehensive metadata describing the world’s academic publications and the scholarly citations that link them, and to preserve ongoing access to this information by secure archiving.

The Mission Statement also presents brief descriptions of the OpenCitations context, our vision, our value proposition and our relationship with the community and stakeholders.

The Uniqueness of OpenCitations provides the answer to the question ‘Why choose to use OpenCitations?’, and is a detailed presentation of OpenCitations’ benefits.

OpenCitations – Present Status and Future Plans summarizes OpenCitations’ ongoing activities, that can be quickly visualized on our public roadmap. It also introduces the OpenCitations Working Groups, served by the members of the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, which are currently working on the themes of governance evolution and community building, with the common purpose of driving OpenCitations along the path from being a ‘sustainable infrastructure’ (in POSI terms) to being an enduring community led and financially sustained infrastructure.

In fulfilling our mission and reaching our goals, the support and vital interest of our community members is fundamental. We request that you, as a member of our community, provide us with feedback on these documents and the ideas they contain, or indeed to ask for clarifications, to help us improving our mission and our communications to explain it. You can reach us here: contact@opencitations.net.

Thank you!

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

Posted on August 10th 2022 by Chiara Di Giambattista

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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.