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Tag: SCOSS

OpenCitations updates: interviews, outreach, research positions, citations

Several important recent events have involved OpenCitations directly as a participant. Here we introduce some of the most significant ones:

  • Our interviews during a Fireside Chat with John Chodacki during the Open Publishing Fest;
  • The SCOSS poster about OpenCitations and the other two selected infrastructures during LIBER 2020, which won the LIBER 2020 Peoples Choice Poster Award;
  • The availability of two new short-term research positions with OpenCitations for our Wellcome Trust funded project (application closing deadline: 23 July 2020); and
  • A new release of COCI, bringing the total number of open citations available in this dataset to more than 721 million.

Open Publishing Fest

The Open Publishing Fest was a decentralized on-line public event held from 18 May to 29 May

to bring together communities supporting open source software, open content, and open publishing models.

(from the Open Publishing Fest website, last visited 4 July 2020)

Within this event, John Chodaki and Cameron Neylon organised a series of sessions named “Fireside Chats” in which they invited people from the open publishing community to discuss their careers and projects. David Shotton and Silvio Peroni were the guests in one of these chats with John Chodaki, in which we talked about the origins of OpenCitations and the plans for OpenCitations’ future. The video of our chat (see link below) is available on YouTube.

The recording of the fireside chat that David Shotton and Silvio Peroni had on May 28th 2020 with John Chodaki in the context of the Open Publishing Fest.

SCOSS at LIBER 2020: promoting open infrastructures

SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services, which selected OpenCitations last December as worthy of community crowd-funding support as part of its second funding cycle, participated in LIBER 2020 with a poster which showcases the infrastructures that they recommend that the community financially supports.

Tweet by SCOSS on the poster presented at Liber 2020.

This poster won the People’s Choice Award and confirms the crucial activity that SCOSS is doing in making the academic community aware of the importance of providing financial support to open infrastructures like OpenCitations for the benefit of the whole of society.

A tweet by SCOSS on the document they wrote on the importance of supporting open infrastructures.

Furthermore, Giannis Tsakonas, Director in the Library & Information Center at the University of Patras (Greece), and a member of the LIBER Executive Board as head of its Innovative Scholarly Communication Steering Committee, shared a wonderful thread on Twitter about OpenCitations and the other open infrastructures (DOAB, OAPEN, and PKP) that have been selected by SCOSS in its second funding cycle.

A thread by Giannis Tsakonas about us and the other open infrastructures selected by SCOSS for their second funding cycle.

Short-term research positions open at OpenCitations in Bologna for our Wellcome Trust funded project

Wellcome Trust announced they have extended all their grants that were due to end in 2020 or 2021, including our Open Research Fund funded project entitled “Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus”. This project aims at providing data for each individual in-text reference pointer (aka in-text citation) and its semantic context, making it possible to distinguish references that are cited only once in the text of a paper 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, potentially, to retrieve the function of each citation.

Some preliminary outcomes of the project have already been described in a recent blog post, and a preprint describing some of the activities of the project has also been also made available on arXiv. That paper focuses on the extensions we have made to the OpenCitations Data Model, used for the storage of data in all the OpenCitations datasets, to enable the additional metadata types resulting from the Citations in Context project to be recorded.

In the context of the funding extension to this Wellcome Trust project, the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies (FICLIT) at the University of Bologna has just opened two new positions for short-term (5 months) research fellowships from August to December 2020 inclusive, for which the application closing deadline is 23 July 2020. The main goals of these the short-term research fellowship are (a) to develop the software for handling the data stored in the Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus, and (b) to develop indexing mechanisms to analyse a large number of documents simultaneously within our local computing environment, without having to use external services.

The net salary for each research fellowship is 1,600 EUR per month, tax free. The minimal requirement to apply for one of these positions is to have a Bachelor degree, although higher qualifications in Computer Science would be beneficial. Since these are University of Bologna positions, the application forms are in Italian. However, the description of the activity plan of the research fellowships is available in both Italian and English.  We would be happy to provide further information, and help in completing the application forms if necessary, so please do not hesitate to email us.

New release of COCI with an additional 18 million citations

Every two months we are able to publish additions to COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. This latest release (dated 4 July 2020) extended COCI with more than 18 million additional citations, so that COCI now contains more than 721 million DOI-to-DOI citation links between more than 58.8 million bibliographic entities.

These new citations were harvested from the most recent Crossref data dump, downloaded on 8 June 2020, which includes the references of articles deposited in Crossref between 4 April 2020 and 4 June 2020. As before, we will use this new release of COCI to update the Coronavirus Open Citations Dataset, the third release of which will include details about relevant additional references and publications.

We remind you that COCI has been fully described in our open-access article

Ivan Heibi, Silvio Peroni & David Shotton (2019). Software review: COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. Scientometrics, 121 (2): 1213-1228. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03217-6

and that all the bibliographic and citation data in COCI:

Announcing the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata and the International Advisory Board for OpenCitations

As mentioned in an earlier blog post, OpenCitations has been selected by SCOSS for its second round of crowd-funding support from stakeholders within the open scholarship community. 

As OpenCitations transitions into this new phase in its trajectory to organizational sustainability, it is to be managed by the newly formed Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna, created both to provide a formal administrative centre to handle the finances of OpenCitations and to facilitate research in this area. 

The statutes of the Research Centre will ensure that OpenCitations’ original aim of free provision of open bibliographic and citation data, services and software is maintained and that OpenCitations as an organization cannot in future be taken over or controlled by commercial interests.

The International Advisory Board for OpenCitations is formally part of the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata. The Board has been created to assist the Directors of OpenCitations by providing stakeholder community input that will guide the future activities and direction of OpenCitations. 

The people who kindly accepted our invitation to serve as members of the Board are leaders within the main scholarly stakeholder communities of relevance to OpenCitations (librarians, scientometricians, academics, publishers, funders, data service providers, etc.) who have shown past solid commitment to open scholarship. They are:

  • John Chodacki (Director of University of California Curation Center, California Digital Library)
  • Ginny Hendricks (Director of Member & Community Outreach, Crossref)
  • Philippe Laredo (Director of Research in the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Scientific  Innovations and Society, Université Gustave Eiffel)
  • Vincent Larivière (Canadian Research Chair on the Transformation of Scholarly Communication, University of Montréal)
  • Catriona Maccallum (Director of Open Science, Hindawi Open Access Publisher)
  • Cameron Neylon (Professor of Research Communications, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University)
  • Catherine Stihler (Chief Executive Officer, Open Knowledge Foundation)
  • Ludo Waltman [chair] (Professor of Quantitative Science Studies and Deputy Director, Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University)

We would like to express our gratitude to them for their willingness to serve and for the excitement they have shown upon being appointed as members of the Board.

Further information about the International Advisory Board, and how it fits within the overall governance structure of OpenCitations, will be announced shortly.

The French National Fund for Open Science supports OpenCitations

The French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) has decided to support OpenCitations, PKP, and DOAB as part of SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services.

FNSO has identified OpenCitations as an infrastructure disseminating bibliographic and citation metadata in open access with a level of quality and coverage that provides a workable, free and open alternative to the academic community’s current dependency on proprietary tools, therefore freeing up possibilities for citation analysis, promoting the evolution of bibliometric indicators and broadening knowledge of science.

The FNSO is contributing € 250,000, which is 16.3% of the amount that was requested under SCOSS and is committing to a political and technical partnership with OpenCitations.

OpenCitations is deeply honoured and delighted that the French Open Science Committee has chosen to award such a substantial portion of its open science budget to support our work. These funds will be spent (a) on strengthening our computational infrastructure, (b) on employing software engineers to develop new data sources and services, and data curators to ensure the highest possible quality of our data, and (c) on community engagement through workshops and publications.

OpenCitations described

OpenCitations is an infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data. We at OpenCitations are proud to announce the publication, in the first issue of Quantitative Science Studies, of a canonical paper in which we introduce and describe OpenCitations and outline its achievements and goals [1].

Here, I outline the contents of our paper, and provide definitive links on the topics described. Many of these topics have been the subjects of earlier blog posts.

This paper appears in the first Special Issue of QSS, dedicated to the description of the bibliometric data sources that lie at the heart of scientometric research, which aims to characterize the most important data sources currently available and to show how they differ in various dimensions, for instance in the data they provide, their level of openness, and their support for making research reproducible. The first three papers in this special issue cover the most important commercial bibliographic data sources: Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics), Scopus (Elsevier), and Dimensions (Digital Science), while the remaining three articles describe open data sources: Microsoft Academic, Crossref and OpenCitations.

In the introduction to our own paper, we describe the origins of OpenCitations, discuss the growth and benefits of open science, and introduce the Semantic Web techniques used at OpenCitations for recording and publishing our data. We then go on to describe OpenCitations’ services and data, namely Open Citation Identifiers, the OpenCitations Data Model, the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies, the OpenCitations Corpus, and the OpenCitations Indexes of citation data, of which the first and largest is COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, that currently holds information on over 624 million citations. We conclude our survey of OpenCitations’ services and data by outlining the generic open source software developed at OpenCitations, including OSCAR, the OpenCitations RDF Search Application for searching over RDF datasets, LUCINDA, OSCAR’s associated OpenCitations RDF Resource Browser, and RAMOSE, OpenCitations’ application for creating REST APIs over SPARQL endpoints, thus opening Semantic Web datasets to those not familiar with SPARQL, the RDF query language.

In the second half of the paper, we describe OpenCitations as an organization in terms of its compliance with the principles for the sustainability of open infrastructures proposed by Bilder, Lin and Neylon (2015) [2], and report the selection of OpenCitations by the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) as an open infrastructure organization worthy of crowd-funding support by the stakeholder community. We then provide usage statistics for our datasets and web site, and describe the adoption of OpenCitations data and services by the community, before concluding with a forward look at our proposed developments of OpenCitations activities.

References

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

[2] Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin and Cameron Neylon (2015). Principles for open scholarly infrastructures. Figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859

OpenCitations selected for SCOSS second funding cycle

The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) is launching its second funding cycle, and OpenCitations is one of three open science infrastructure organizations whose services have been evaluated and selected 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).

OpenCitations is an innovative infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data concerning academic publications as Linked Open Data using Semantic Web technologies, thereby providing a disruptive alternative to traditional proprietary citation indexes. It also undertakes related advocacy work, particularly as a founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC).

OpenCitations developed the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), a database of open downloadable bibliographic and citation data recorded in RDF and released under a Creative Commons CC0 public domain waiver, which currently contains information about 14 million citation links to over 7.5 million cited resources. In addition and separately, OpenCitations is currently developing a number of Open Citation Indexes, using the data openly available in third-party bibliographic databases. The first and largest of these is COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, which presently contains information encoded in RDF on more than 445 million citations, released under a CC0 waiver.

OpenCitations structures its data according to the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM), that may also be employed by third parties, either for their own use or to structure their data for submission to and publication by OpenCitations. This model uses OpenCitations’ suite of SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies developed to describe all aspects of the scholarly publishing domain. OpenCitations has also published open software of generic applicability for searching, browsing and providing REST APIs over RDF triplestores.

OpenCitations fully supports the founding principles of Open Science. It complies with the FAIR data principles proposed by Force11 that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable, and it complies with the recommendations of I4OC that citation data, in particular, should be structured, separable and open. OpenCitations has published a formal definition of an open citation, and has launched a system for globally unique and persistent identifiers (PIDs) for bibliographic citations – the Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs) – for which it maintains an OCI resolution service.

OpenCitations has the potential to be a game-changer in the scholarly information landscape, giving institutions and individuals the ability to analyse and reuse publication citations in other infrastructures, in library collections, and in research. Open citation data are particularly valuable for bibliometric analysis, increasing the reproducibility of large-scale analyses by enabling the publication of the source data upon which analytical results are based. Since citation data are also crucial to evaluating research performance, such access to open, transparent citation data sources is a priority for Open Science.

SCOSS was formed in early 2017 with the purpose of providing a new coordinated and targeted crowd-sourcing and cost-sharing framework to enable the Open Access and Open Science communities to support the open infrastructure services on which they depend. In its first funding cycle, more than 1.5 million euros was pledged by more than 200 institutions worldwide to help fund and sustain the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and SHERPA/RoMEO.

With the launch of its second funding cycle, SCOSS is appealing to academic institutions and their libraries, research institutes, publishers, funding organisations, national and regional governments, international organisations, learned societies and service providers worldwide —  everyone who is invested in Open Access and Open Science — to support one or more of these three new selected open infrastructure services through a three-year commitment.

For more details about the services, suggested funding levels, and how you can help support OpenCitations, please see https://sparceurope.org/download/7913/ or contact us at donations@opencitations.net.