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From little acorns . . . A retrospective on OpenCitations

The initial vision

Now that OpenCitations is hosting over one billion freely available scholarly bibliographic citations, this is perhaps an opportune moment to look back to the start of this initiative. A little over eleven years ago, on 24 April 2010, I spoke at the Open Knowledge Foundation Conference, OKCon2010, in London, on the topic

OpenCitations: Publishing Bibliographic Citations as Linked Open Data

I reported that, earlier that same week, I had applied to Jisc for a one-year grant to fund the OpenCitations Project (opencitations.net). Jisc (at that time ‘The JISC’, the Joint Information Systems Committee) was tasked by the UK government, among other things, to support research and development in information technology for the benefit of the academic community.

The purpose of that original OpenCitations R&D project was to develop a prototype in which we:

  • harvested citations from the open access biomedical literature in PubMed Central;
  • described and linked them using CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology [1];
  • encoded and organized them in an RDF triplestore; and
  • published them as Linked Open Data in the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC).

I told those at the conference that in this demonstration project, with limited JISC funding, we could not hope to “boil the whole ocean”, but that nevertheless there would be substantial benefits from even partial coverage of citation data from the scholarly literature:

  • We could show the way and establish best practice.
  • Despite partial coverage, all key papers would most likely be cited several times.
  • The overall topological structure of the citation network would be revealed.
  • We would create a ‘benchmark’ corpus of high-quality RDF citation data that could be used to develop analytical and visualization tools.
  • We could show the value of open citation data in helping scholars to discover full text articles of all types, and thus encourage subscription-access publishers to release their reference metadata.

The important thing, I said, was to make a start!

The Jisc OpenCitations Project

That JISC grant application was funded, and the project, to last for a year with modest funding of £100K, started in my lab in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University on 1st June 2010, and was subsequently extended for a further six months.

Using data from the Open Access subset of PubMed Central, we created the first prototype release of the OpenCitations Corpus of linked bibliographic citation data, containing 6,529,815 independent bibliographic records of both citing and cited entities, comprising references to ~20% of all post-1980 articles recorded in PubMed, including those to all the most important highly cited papers in every field of biomedical endeavour.

This achievement was almost entirely the result of the excellent work by our chief data wrangler Alex Dutton, whose skill and natural feel for linked data did wonders for this project. Ben O’Steen, Graham Klyne and Alistair Miles made important contributions.

The project also resulted in many other development, described here, most which were developed or at least initiated during a short but wonderfully productive collaboration with Silvio Peroni, who spent six months with me in 2010 as a doctoral student intern from the University of Bologna, to which he subsequently returned to complete his thesis and develop his academic career.

These included:

  • the deconstruction and re-development of the original version of CiTO into a suite of orthogonal and complementary ontologies covering the whole domain of scholarly publishing – the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies [2, 3];
  • the mapping of various existing metadata schemas into RDF using SPAR, including the DataCite Metadata Schema, and subsequently JATS, now the default NISO standard for XML markup of scholarly documents) [4]; and
  • the initiation of the Semantic Publishing Blog and this OpenCitations Blog.

Life after Jisc – the flowering of OpenCitations

After the Jisc funding ended and I, after a long career in biological teaching and research, formally retired from the Department of Zoology at the Oxford University, members of the initial OpenCitations team moved on to other things. Like so many grant-funded academic project whose initial financial support had dried up, OpenCitations could have foundered at that stage, as an interesting prototype but with too little content to be useful. However, the concept of providing an open alternative to proprietary citation indexes was too important to abandon. But how could it be transitioned into something enduring and useful, particularly when as a matter of principle one had decided that the citation data should be made freely available, thus precluding income generation by charging for ‘premium’ services or the formation of a commercial spin-off?

Finally, I realized that something radical needed to be done to move OpenCitations forward. I had maintained a lively collaboration with Silvio Peroni at the University of Bologna, resulting between 2011 and 2014 in the publication of 18 articles and conference papers concerning the SPAR ontologies, ontology development, documentation and visualization, and related topics, and in 2015 I invited him to start working with me directly on OpenCitations. It was the best decision I could have made. We decided to take the initial concept and re-implement it from the bottom up. OpenCitations gave Silvio a major computer science project to which he could apply his considerable talent, and soon resulted in the development of a revised RDF data model for describing citation data, the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM) [5] and a suite of new software tools to harvest, organise and publish citations at linked open data [6]. The credit for almost all the subsequent conceptual and technical developments within OpenCitations, which have incrementally led to our present situation, is due to Silvio Peroni, and the scholarly community is indebted to him for the intelligence, skill and diligent application he has given to OpenCitations over the past six years. I am truly honoured to have Silvio as co-Director of OpenCitations, and wish to take this opportunity to acknowledge his contributions and to thank him publicly.

Our work on OpenCitations at that stage, summarized in [7], would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support of Silvio’s senior colleague Fabio Vitali and of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Bologna, which not only provided a stimulating environment for Silvio’s post-doctoral work, but also supplied computing services and infrastructure at no charge to OpenCitations. It was also greatly helped by Professor David De Roure of Oxford University, who gave me an academic home and a formal affiliation within the Oxford e-Research Centre after my retirement from the Department of Zoology, which enabled me to continue to hold research grants.

As has been documented in earlier posts in this blog, we greatly benefitted in 2017 from a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation which enabled us to purchase a new and more powerful computing infrastructure for the sole use of OpenCitations and to extend and improve our software, and subsequently in 2019 by a project grant from the Wellcome Trust to develop the Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus, that permitted the extension of OCDM and SPAR for the characterization of in-text references and their textual contexts.

A significant breakthrough came in January 2018 with our decision to treat citations as first-class data entities, each with its own persistent identifier (PID), the Open Citations Identifier (OCI) [8]. This gave Silvio the freedom to envision a new kind of database, a citation index in which each citation had its own metadata, including citation timespan, citation categorization (e.g. self-citation), and of course the DOIs of the citing and cited publications. The creation of this new index was possible only with the incredible effort by Ivan Heibi, who served as a Research Fellow in the project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at that time, and who was entirely responsible for developing the first version of the code necessary for creating such a database. Having harvested all the open references from Crossref metadata dumps, Silvio and Ivan created COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref DOI-to-DOI Citations, which immediately became our principal source of open citations, the original OpenCitations Corpus being retained as a ‘sandbox’ in which to experiment with new data representations, for example those required for the Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus. Access to COCI was facilitated by Silvio’s development of a REST API, using his software tool RAMOSE (Restful API Manager Over SPARQL Endpoints), which enables the easily configurable deployment of a REST API over any SPARQL endpoint to an RDF triplestore [9]. We were able to organize our all data, both ‘traditional’ and new, and to encode it in RDF, thanks to the comprehensive OpenCitations Data Model [5], itself based on our SPAR Ontologies [3], which we evolved as necessary to accommodate new data representation requirements.

During this period we published a number of definitions, conference papers and journal articles documenting these advances, details of which can be found here. Of these, the most recent canonical publication describing OpenCitations as an infrastructure for open scholarship, and its datasets, tools, services and activities, is Peroni and Shotton (2020) [10]. We also established the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna, primarily to handle administrative, financial and academic aspects of OpenCitations activities.

OpenCitations’ future

The problem remained: how to sustain the OpenCitations infrastructure financially. We were greatly helped by Bilder, Lin and Neylon’s formulation of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures (POSI) [11], in which they clearly pointing out that reliance solely on grant funding for specific projects was not the answer. OpenCitations compliance with POSI is described here. We were thus immensely grateful that SPARC Europe and other institutions had the wisdom to establish SCOSS (The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services) to facilitate the crowd-sourced financial support of useful open infrastructures by the scholarly community, including academic libraries, government agencies and other stakeholders. OpenCitations applied for SCOSS support in 2019, which led to the selection of OpenCitations for support in the SCOSS second round.

The donations we are now starting to receive from such stakeholders, and the new staff that this funding has recently allowed us to hire, signal the start of our transition from a financially vulnerable academic project to a sustainable open scholarly infrastructure of real value to the community.

The work of opening more of the global citation graph now requires two things:

  • that each publisher takes responsibility for ensuring that the references from all of its journal articles and books are submitted, together with all other bibliographic metadata, to open scholarly bibliographic metadata aggregators such as Crossref and DataCite, from which they can be indexed into open citation indexes of sufficient quality, depth of detail and breadth of coverage that these offer genuine alternatives to the expensive proprietary citation indexing services upon which the academic community presently relies; and
  • that the entire scholarly stakeholder community re-directs a fraction of the enormous sums currently spent on its subscriptions to proprietary bibliographic services in order to support Open Science infrastructures such as OpenCitations that making citations and other forms of scholarly metadata and objects freely available.

References

[1] David Shotton (2010). CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology. J. Biomedical Semantics 1 (Suppl. 1): S6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2041-1480-1-S1-S6

[2] Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2012). FaBiO and CiTO: ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations. Web Semantics, 17: 33-34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2012.08.001, OA at http://speroni.web.cs.unibo.it/publications/peroni-2012-fabio-cito-ontologies.pdf

[3] Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2018). The SPAR Ontologies. In Proceedings of the 17th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2018): 119-136. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00668-6_8

[4] Peroni S, Lapeyre DA and Shotton D (2012) From Markup to Linked Data: Mapping NISO JATS v1.0 to RDF using the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies. Proc. 2012 JATS Conference, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, USA (October 2012): 16-17. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK100491/

[5] Marilena Daquino, Silvio Peroni , David Shotton (2020). The OpenCitations Data Model. Figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3443876.v7

[6] Silvio Peroni, David Shotton, Fabio Vitali (2017). One Year of the OpenCitations Corpus: Releasing RDF-based scholarly citation data into the Public Domain. In The Semantic Web – ISWC 2017 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 10588, pp. 184–192). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68204-4_19

[7] Silvio Peroni, Alexander Dutton, Tanya Gray, David Shotton (2015). Setting our bibliographic references free: towards open citation data. Journal of Documentation, 71 (2): 253-277. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JD-12-2013-0166, OA at http://speroni.web.cs.unibo.it/publications/peroni-2015-setting-bibliographic-references.pdf

[8] Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2019). Open Citation Identifier: Definition. Figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7127816

[9] Daquino, M., Heibi, I., Peroni, S., & Shotton, D. (2021). Creating Restful APIs over SPARQL endpoints with RAMOSE. Semantic Web. http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.16079

[10] Silvio Peroni, 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

[11] Geoffrey Bilder, Jenny Lin, Cameron Neylon (2015). Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859

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:

The Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus: Progress Report

The creation of the Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus (CCC) is the goal of a one-year project funded by the Wellcome Trust. The aim is to create a new open corpus of bibliographic and citation data that contain detailed information about individual in-text reference pointers in biomedical journal articles. The project is led by Professor Silvio Peroni of the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata (University of Bologna), is being undertaken by Dr Marilena Daquino (University of Bologna), and actively involves the Oxford e-Research Centre (University of Oxford), the École de Bibliothéconomie et des Sciences de l’Information (Université de Montréal), and the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), (Leiden University).

An in-text reference pointer is a textual device (e.g. “[1]”, or “(Peroni and Shotton 2012)”) that appears in the main text of a citing work and denotes a bibliographic reference listed in the Bibliography section of the citing work. While a single in-text reference pointer uniquely denotes a single bibliographic reference, it can occur together with one or more other pointers, forming an in-text reference pointer list that denotes several references (e.g. “[5-13]”, or “(Peroni and Shotton 2012; Peroni and Shotton 2019)”). In-text reference pointers may appear in several places within the same citing publication (e.g. Introduction, Methods, Discussion), may occur within different document components (e.g. body text, figure captions, tables), and may address the cited publication for different purposes (e.g. as the source of an experimental protocol, as a data source, or for general background information).

Unfortunately, current citation indexes contain no information about in-text reference pointers, such as the number of times a particular work is referenced in the citing work, the text of the sentences in which they occur, or the rhetorical purpose of such citations.

Having data at the level of individual in-text reference pointers offers many new opportunities, enabling one: (1) to distinguish between works that are referenced just once in a citing publication and those that are referenced multiple times, and thereby (potentially) to distinguish when a citation is fundamental for the understanding or the development of the citing work, or merely incidental; (2) to see which in-text reference pointers occur together (e.g. in the same sentence or the same paragraph), thus, potentially, to infer similarities between the co-cited publications; and (3) to determine in which specific sections of the publication these in-text references occur (e.g. Introduction, Methods, Results), and thus, potentially, by means of textual analysis of the citation contexts, to retrieve the rhetorical functions of the citations – i.e. the reason why an author cites another work. 

The goal of the CCC Project is to provide stakeholders with an exemplar Linked Open Data corpus, created from the open access biomedical research literature, that is tailored for such deep citation analyses. The corpus will be a new member of the collection of OpenCitations datasets, and will be accompanied by services for accessing and querying data.

In the CCC Project, we have achieved or are currently dealing with the following developments:

  • Extending the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM). The OpenCitations Data Model has been extended and enriched with new terms and relations to represent bibliographic entities related to in-text reference pointers, such as the in-text reference pointers themselves, in-text reference pointer lists, discourse elements (e.g. sections, paragraphs, sentences), and annotations on citations, bibliographic references and in-text reference pointers. In addition, the provenance layer of the data model has been revised to provide meaningful provenance information in a more compact way. A revised version of the OCDM including these terms was published on November 8, 2019, and it is available on Figshare [1].
  • Extending the OpenCitation harvesting and data re-engineering pipeline. The CCC Project leverages existing OpenCitations technologies for building this new corpus, using as input articles from the Open Access Subset of biomedical literature hosted by Europe PubMed Central (EPMC) and encoded in XML. The OpenCitations pipelines for knowledge extraction (i.e. the software called BEE) and for data re-engineering (i.e. the software called SPACIN) have been enhanced so as to harvest relevant information from the full-text of the XML sources provided by EPMC, rather than just the reference lists,  and to transform these data into RDF according to the revised OCDM. The source code of the new pipeline is available on GitHub.
  • Creating InTRePID, a new persistent identifier for in-text reference pointers. Different in-text reference pointers denoting the same bibliographic reference have distinct logical, rhetorical and textual contexts wherein they occur. To permit them to be identified individually and handled properly, we have recently developed a new persistent identifier, the In-Text Reference Pointer Identifier (InTRePID), for identifying individual in-text reference pointers relating to an open bibliographic citation. The InTRePID is based on the Open Citation Identifier (OCI), currently being used to identify the >624 million citations present in the new release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, described in the previous blog post. The formal definition of an InTRePID is available on Figshare [2]. In addition, an InTRePID Resolution Service has been developed (currently in beta-testing) to facilitate the retrieval of the metadata relating to in-text reference pointers. At the moment, a subset of the CCC corpus is available online for testing the InTRePID Resolution Service.
  • Development of services for accessing and querying the Citations in Context Corpus. Along with the development of the CCC itself, we are also developing services for querying data within the CCC. In particular, we are currently working to extend the RAMOSE software to provide an API for accessing the CCC triplestore. This CCC API will permit users to access the CCC corpus and retrieve detailed information about in-text reference pointers and their related annotations in a variety of human- and machine-readable formats. The source code of the API Manager is available on GitHub. The configuration file for querying the CCC corpus is still in the process of development.

Moreover, we are currently working to evaluate the content data quality of the CCC corpus and to develop reconciliation activities with information stored in Crossref. Specifically, by means of new validation methods, we are testing whether the extracted in-text reference pointers are complete (i.e. determining that all the in-text reference pointers for a particular bibliographic reference have been correctly extracted from the text), and that in-text reference pointer lists (e.g. “[5-13]”) have been correctly parsed to extract all the implicit pointers (in this case “[6]”, “[7]”, “[8]”, “[9]”, “[10]”, “[11]” and “[12]”), and to associate them correctly with the appropriate bibliographic references that they denote. This activity is fundamental, in order to address the diverse citation styles adopted by different journals and to overcome possible incoherencies in the publishers’ XML markup of the articles. Secondly, whenever a DOI is not specified for the citing or cited publications in the full-text of the citing publication, a text search using the Crossref API is performed in order to match possible candidates and supply the missing DOI. This reconciliation process itself can be error-prone since recommended matches are obtained by means of a non-transparent scoring mechanism. Therefore we are currently testing the application of a scoring threshold that will eliminate false positives and provide us only with correct results.

The deployment of the enhanced OpenCitations pipeline for populating the CCC corpus automatically is planned to start in the next weeks. For more details and to provide suggestions, please contact us!

References

[1] Marilena Daquino, Silvio Peroni and David Shotton (2019). The OpenCitations Data Model. Version 2.0. Figshare. DOI:  ​https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3443876 

[2] David Shotton, Marilena Daquino and Silvio Peroni (2020). In-Text Reference Pointer Identifier: Definition. Figshare.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11674032

The Wellcome Trust funds OpenCitations

The Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus funded by the Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Trust, which funds research in big health challenges and campaigns for better science, has agreed to fund The Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus, a new project to enhance the OpenCitations Corpus, as part of the Open Research Fund programme.

As readers of this blog will know, the OpenCitations Corpus is an open scholarly citation database that freely and legally makes available accurate citation data (academic references) to assist scholars with their academic studies, and to serve knowledge to the wider public.

Objectives

The Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus, funded by the Wellcome Trust for 12 months from March 2019, will make the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC) more useful to the academic community by significantly expanding the kinds of citation data held within the Corpus, so as to provide data for each individual in-text reference and its semantic context, making it possible 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, potentially, to retrieve the function of the citation.

At OpenCitations, we will achieve these objectives in the following ways:

  • by extending the OpenCitations Data Model so as to describe how the in-text reference data should be modeled in RDF for inclusion in the OpenCitations Corpus;
  • by develping scripts for extracting in-text references from articles within the Open Access Subset of biomedical literature hosted by Europe PubMed Central;
  • by extending the existing ingestion workflow so as to add the new in-text reference data into the Corpus;
  • by developing appropriate user interfaces for querying and browsing these new data.

Personnel

We are looking for a post-doctoral computer scientist / research engineer specifically to achieves the aforementioned objectives. This post-doctoral appointment will start the 1st of March 2019. We seek a highly intelligent, skilled and motivated individual who is expert in Python, Semantic Web technologies, Linked Data and Web technologies. Additional expertise in Web Interface Design and Information Visualization would be highly beneficial, plus a strong and demonstrable commitment to open science and team-working abilities.

The minimal formal requirement for this position is a Masters degree in computer science, computer science and engineering, telecommunications engineering, or equivalent title, but it is expected that the successful applicant will have had research experience leading to a doctoral degree. The position has a net salary (exempt from income tax, after deduction of social security contributions) in excess of 23K euros per year.

The formal advertisement for this post – which will be held at the Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre (DHARC), Department of Computer Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna, Italy, under the supervision of Dr Silvio Peroni – is published online, and it is accompanied by the activity plan (in Italian and English). The application must be presented exclusively online by logging in the website https://concorsi.unibo.it (default in Italian, but there is a link to switch the language in English). People who do not have a @unibo.it email account must register to the platform. The deadline for application is the 25th January 2019 at 15:00 Central Europe Time. Please feel free to contact Silvio Peroni (silvio dot peroni at unibo dot it) for further information.

People involved

The people formally involved in the projects are:

  • Vincent Larivière – École de Bibliothéconomie et des Sciences de l’Information, Université de Montréal, Canada;
  • Silvio Peroni (Principal Investigator) – Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre (DHARC), Department of Computer Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna, Italy, and Director of OpenCitations;
  • David Shotton – Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, and Director of OpenCitations;
  • Ludo Waltman – Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, Netherlands.

In addition, the project is supported by Europe PubMed Central (EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK).