The International Advisory Board for OpenCitations is one of the four organizational bodies which define OpenCitations’s governance structure (Director; Council; Advisory Board; Management Team). The Board is a committee of the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna, and is made up of Open Infrastrucutures and Open Science experts elected by the Council of OpenCitations among a plethora of candidates. The role of the International Advisory Board is to give strategic advice, and guide OpenCitations development by providing an outsider’s point of view on our activities.
The first structure of the Advisory Board was defined by the election, back in 2020, of eight members selected by the Council within the main scholarly stakeholder communities of relevance to OpenCitations (librarians, scientometricians, academics, publishers, funders, data service providers, etc.). These members have served OpenCitations for the last four years, and have accompanied and addressed some of the major changes in OpenCitations. Indeed, in the previous four years, OpenCitations has grown in team composition, community collaborations and data provision. In these years, our coverage approached that of the major databases, we have revolutionized our ingestion workflow to manage a growing number of data sources, and thanks to the involvement of some members of the Advisory Board in two internal working groups, we have been working on the stakeholder identification and governance evolution.
It was right in the Governance Evolution working group that, in the last year, the need to renovate the International Advisory Board composition has emerged, intending to make the renewal process recurring every three years after the pilot experience with the first International Advisory Board. As an initial action resulting from the Governance Evolution Working group, we held the elections of the members of the new International Board on OpenCitations in the first week of December. The voting council selected eight members among ten candidates who strongly committed to open scholarship.
We are now happy to announce the new members of the International Advisory Board, and while thanking them for their enthusiastic involvement in the Board, we also want to express our gratitude to the former Board members who have accompanied us in the last four years. The new International Advisory Board will also welcome one representative from OpenCitations’ Strategic Member (Scientific Interest Group of the French National Fund for Open Science) as a non-elected Board member.
The new members of the International Board for OpenCitations are:
Marcel R. Ackermann (Team Lead of dblp Computer Science Bibliography)
Maria Gould (Product Director at DataCite and Director of ROR)
Catriona MacCallum (Director of Open Science, Hindawi Open Access Publisher)
Philippe Mongeon (Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Information Science at University of Montreal)
Cameron Neylon (Professor of Research Communications, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University)
Iratxe Puebla (Director of Make Data Count)
Dominika Tkaczyk (Director of Data Science at CrossRef)
Didier Torny (on behalf of the French Open Science Committee)
Ludo Waltman (Professor of Quantitative Science Studies and Deputy Director, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University)
The International Advisory Board’s activities will start early in 2025, picking up the threads of the previous Board’s work. We look forward to working with relevant actors in the Open Science community.
