The blog of the OpenCitations Infrastructure

Research Information can be defined as an information (sometimes referred to as metadata) relating to the conduct and communication of research.

University of Bologna

Research Information

can be defined as an information (sometimes referred to as metadata) relating to the conduct and communication of research.

OpenCitations supports the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information for a fundamental transformation in the research information landscape

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 … Continue reading

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

OpenCitations needs you: support the change in research practices

OpenCitations has always existed

 thanks to

and

 for

its community, a diverse network of institutions and individuals who believe in the value of open scholarly data. As a community-based open infrastructure, our strength lies in collaboration. The insights, feedback, and experiences shared by our community partners are what help us refine our services and keep our mission aligned with the evolving global research ecosystem.

Shape the future of OpenCitations: take our Community Survey

OPERAS hosted the launch of the GRAPHIA project in Brussels earlier this year.

OPERAS hosted the launch of the GRAPHIA project in Brussels earlier this year. On the 22nd and 23rd January, 2025, 21 partner institutions met in OPERAS’ office and online to celebrate the project which is funded by the European Commission for over €8 million, plus an additional €1.6 million from the Switzerland State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation.

GRAPHIA Project Launched in January 2025

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.

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.

Wheels Are in Motion: OpenCitations’ progress in 2024

Blog post by Ivan Heibi (University of Bologna), Arianna Moretti (University of Bologna) and Chiara Di Giambattista (University of Bologna). In the past five years, the OpenCitations data has been enriched with numerous new indexes of open citation data from different sources.

Blog post by Ivan Heibi (University of Bologna), Arianna Moretti (University of Bologna) and Chiara Di Giambattista (University of Bologna).

In the past five years, the OpenCitations data has been enriched with numerous new indexes of open citation data from different sources.

A new revolutionary workflow for a unified collection of citations: say hello to the OpenCitations Index

This blog post is the first of a series dedicated to the description and promotion of OpenCitations Meta.  In addition to OpenCitations’ Citation Indexes, OpenCitations is pleased to announce a new service: OpenCitations Meta, a database which stores and delivers bibliographic metadata for all publications involved in the OpenCitations citation indexes.

This blog post is the first of a series dedicated to the description and promotion of OpenCitations Meta.

In addition to OpenCitations’ Citation Indexes, OpenCitations is pleased to announce a new service:

 OpenCitations Meta

, a database which stores and delivers

 bibliographic

metadata for all publications involved in the OpenCitations citation indexes.

A technical overview of OpenCitations Meta

We’re excited to introduce

 DOCI, the OpenCitations Index of Datacite open DOI-to-DOI citations

, a new tool containing citations derived from publications bearing DataCite DOIs to other DOI-identified publications, harvested from DataCite.

Discover DOCI, the index of open citations from DataCite

OpenCitations has happily joined the open-source social media platform joinmastodon.org.

Follow OpenCitations on Mastodon

We’re happy to announce the 3rd edition of the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC2022), to be held online on 5 October 2022 (h. 15-18 CEST). It has now been two years since the last edition of the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC2020) took place as an online event.

We’re happy to announce the 3rd edition of the

 Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC2022)

, to be held

 online on 5 October 2022 (h. 15-18 CEST)

. It has now been two years since the last edition of the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC2020) took place as an online event.

Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata &#8211; 5 October 2022

This post was first published on


 QUERTY: musings from the rabbit


 hole

,

 a blog by Silvio Peroni

In the scholarly ecosystem, a bibliographic citation is a

 conceptual

directional link from a citing entity to a cited entity, used to acknowledge or ascribe credit for the contribution made by the author(s) of the cited entity.

Transparency meets open citations

Want to keep yourself updated about the ongoing activities of OpenCitations? We have now publicly released the OpenCitations Roadmap, available on Trello.com: https://trello.com/b/RprHYoKL/opencitations The OpenCitations Roadmap consists of a board fulfilled with colour-labelled cards which present the goals so far reached, the present projects and activities, and the future plans.

Want to keep yourself updated about the ongoing activities of OpenCitations? We have now publicly released the OpenCitations Roadmap, available on Trello.com:  https://trello.com/b/RprHYoKL/opencitations   The OpenCitations Roadmap consists of a board fulfilled with colour-labelled cards which present the goals so far reached, the present projects and activities, and the future plans.

The OpenCitations Roadmap is now publicly available on Trello

“The competitive benefits of closing access to citation data diminish with each new citation released to the public domain, but the benefits of open data remain.

“The competitive benefits of closing access to citation data diminish with each new citation released to the public domain, but the benefits of open data remain. Going forward, citation data is almost completely public domain”

. With these words, from the article “A tipping point for open citations data” (July 15, 2021), Ian Hutchins celebrated the threshold crossing of one billion citations on public-domain databases in February 2021.

Crossing a significant threshold: more than one billion citations now available in COCI!

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.

The French National Fund for Open Science supports OpenCitations

COCI is the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, all released as CC0 material, and is described in the article Heibi I, Peroni S, Shotton D (2019). Software review: COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations.

 Scientometrics

121(2): 1213-1228.

More than 624 million citations now available on COCI

Among the external services used, the ORCID Public API is of crucial importance for the task of author disambiguation. During the OCC ingestion workflow, the main metadata of an article are usually retrieved from the Crossref API.

Among the external services used, the

 ORCID Public API

is of crucial importance for the task of author disambiguation. During the OCC ingestion workflow, the main metadata of an article are usually retrieved from the Crossref API.

Using the ORCID Public API for author disambiguation in the OpenCitations Corpus

OpenCitations [1], the EXCITE Project [2] and Europe PubMed Central [3] are pleased to announce a Workshop on Open Citations at the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy [4] on 3-5 September – https://workshop-oc.github.io. Format and topics Day One and Day Two: Formal presentations and discussions on the creation, availability, uses and applications of open … Continue reading Workshop on Open Citations

University of Oxford

OpenCitations [1], the EXCITE Project [2] and Europe PubMed Central [3] are pleased to announce a

 Workshop on Open Citations

at the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy [4] on 3-5 September – https://workshop-oc.github.io.

 Format and topics

Day One and Day Two: Formal presentations and discussions on the creation, availability, uses and applications of open bibliographic citations, and of bibliometric

Workshop on Open Citations

Requirements for citations to be treated as First-Class Data Entities In my introductory blog post, I listed five requirements for the treatment of citations as first-class data entities.  The fourth of these requirements is that they must be identifiable using a global persistent identifier scheme.

Requirements for citations to be treated as First-Class Data Entities

In my introductory blog post, I listed five requirements for the treatment of citations as first-class data entities.  The fourth of these requirements is that they must be identifiable using a global persistent identifier scheme.

Citations as First-Class Data Entities: Open Citation Identifiers

Since 1st January 2018, Crossref has had a new reference distribution policy, described at https://www.crossref.org/reference-distribution/. There are three possible options for setting the reference distribution preference from which a publisher can choose, these being ‘Closed’, ‘Limited’ and ‘Open”. If the ‘Closed’ option is chosen, the references will only be used for the Crossref Cited-by service, … Continue reading The new Crossref

Since 1st January 2018, Crossref has had a new reference distribution policy, described at https://www.crossref.org/reference-distribution/.  There are three possible options for setting the reference distribution preference from which a publisher can choose, these being ‘Closed’, ‘Limited’ and ‘Open”.  If the ‘Closed’ option is chosen, the references will only be used for the Crossref Cited-by service, and are not distributed via any of the

The new Crossref reference distribution policy

Yesterday (November 23rd 2017) I was working with Daniel Ecer of eLife (d.ecer@elifesciences.org) to dig some hard facts out of the analyses he undertook on data he downloaded from Crossref in September 2017 (Ecer, 2017).

Yesterday (November 23rd 2017) I was working with Daniel Ecer of eLife (d.ecer@elifesciences.org) to dig some hard facts out of the analyses he undertook on data he downloaded from Crossref in September 2017 (Ecer, 2017).  Because of its dominant position in the scholarly publishing world, in this, the second of two related posts, I report the results for references from works published by Elsevier.

Elsevier references dominate those that are not open at Crossref

Last September, I attended the Fifth Annual Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, held in Riga, at which I had been invited to give a paper entitled The Open Citations Corpus – freeing scholarly citation data.  A recording of my talk is available here, and my PowerPoint presentation is separately available here.

Last September, I attended the Fifth Annual Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, held in Riga, at which I had been invited to give a paper entitled

 The


 Open Citations Corpus – freeing scholarly citation data

.  A recording of my talk is available here, and my PowerPoint presentation is separately available here.

Three publications describing the Open Citations Corpus

Ongoing work on the Open Citations extensions project is now reaching the point of visualising – at very much a prototype level at this stage – the outputs of our earlier efforts to import and index the PubMed Central Open Access subset and arXiv.

OpenCitations Team

Ongoing work on the Open Citations extensions project is now reaching the point of visualising – at very much a prototype level at this stage – the outputs of our earlier efforts to import and index the PubMed Central Open Access subset and arXiv. Earlier in this project I asked David to specify a list of questions that he thought researchers might hope to answer by querying our Open Citations Corpus;

Open Citations &#8211; Doing some graph visualisations

The first of six blog posts about libraries and linked data, bearing this title, is to be found at http://semanticpublishing.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/lld1-what-are-linked-data/. A draft of that post, that erroneously appeared here in this blog, has been removed.

The first of six blog posts about libraries and linked data, bearing this title, is to be found at


 http://semanticpublishing.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/lld1-what-are-linked-data/.

A draft of that post, that erroneously appeared here in this blog, has been removed.

Libraries and linked data #1: What are linked data?

As part of our work on the Open Citations extensions project, I have recently been doing one of my favourite things – namely indexing large quantities of data then exploring it. On this project we are interested in the PubMed Central Open Access subset, and more specifically, we are interested in what we can do … Continue reading Open Citations – Indexing PubMed Central OA data

As part of our work on the Open Citations extensions project, I have recently been doing one of my favourite things – namely indexing large quantities of data then exploring it.  On this project we are interested in the PubMed Central Open Access subset, and more specifically, we are interested in what we can do with the citation data contained within the records that are in that subset – because, as they are open access, that citation data is

Open Citations &#8211; Indexing PubMed Central OA data

Following the decision to merge the planned development of the Open Citations Corpus with the Related Work Project, described in the previous blog post, we proposed to develop one underlying data store, one data model and one RDF representation.

Following the decision to merge the planned development of the Open Citations Corpus with the

 Related Work

Project, described in the previous blog post, we proposed to develop one underlying data store, one data model and one RDF representation.

Open Citations developments

Previously, my blog posts relating to semantic publishing have appeared in this Open Citations Blog.

Previously, my blog posts relating to semantic publishing have appeared in this

 Open Citations Blog

. However, because of the merger of the Open Citations Project with the Related Work Project, described here, this Open Citations Blog has been renamed

 Open Citations and Related Work

and has been opened to contributions from others involved in developing Open Citations and Related Work.

The start of something new

I am very pleased to announce that last year Ian Bannerman, Managing Director for Journals at Taylor &amp; Francis, confirmed this publisher’s willingness to pilot the opening of the reference lists from articles in 29 of their subscription access journals, as well as from all of their current list of 15 Open Access journals, for … Continue reading Taylor &amp;

I am very pleased to announce that last year Ian Bannerman,


Managing Director for Journals at Taylor &amp; Francis, confirmed this publisher’s willingness to pilot the opening of the reference lists from articles in 29 of their subscription access journals, as well as from all of their current list of 15 Open Access journals, for inclusion in the Open Citations Corpus.

Taylor &amp; Francis to open article reference lists

[The text of this post was updated on 27-09-2013 and 04-04-2017 to reflect a new CrossRef metadata best practice document and a change in their URI.] Today I wrote an open letter to all scholarly journal publishers, available online here, entitled: Open your article reference lists for inclusion in the Open Citations Corpus.

[The text of this post was updated on 27-09-2013 and 04-04-2017 to reflect a new CrossRef metadata best practice document and a change in their URI.] Today I wrote an open letter to all scholarly journal publishers, available online here, entitled:

 Open your article reference lists for inclusion in the Open Citations Corpus.

In this letter, I request that publishers open the bibliographic citation data in their journal article reference

Open letter to publishers

JATS, the Journal Article Tag Suite, defines a vocabulary of XML elements and attributes used to describe the content and metadata of journal articles.

JATS, the Journal Article Tag Suite, defines a vocabulary of XML elements and attributes used to describe the content and metadata of journal articles.  As described in the previous post, we have mapped the metadata elements of the JATS Journal Publishing Tag Set to RDF, so that publishers’ XML article metadata encoded using JATS might become part of the web of linked data.

An entry form for JATS metadata

JATS, the Journal Article Tag Suite, defines a vocabulary of XML elements and attributes used to describe the content and metadata of journal articles.  In this post, I describe the mapping of JATS to RDF, so that publishers’ XML article metadata encoded using JATS might become part of the web of linked data.

Mapping JATS to RDF

I am pleased to announce that the JISC have funded an extension to the Open Citations Project to run from 1st August 2012 until 31st January 2013, during which we will review and revise the technology used to create the Open Citations Corpus, will update the content provided by PubMed Central, and will improve its … Continue reading Open Citations Extension Project

I am pleased to announce that the JISC have funded an extension to the Open Citations Project to run from 1st August 2012 until 31st January 2013, during which we will review and revise the technology used to create the Open Citations Corpus, will update the content provided by PubMed Central, and will improve its presentation.

Open Citations Extension Project

I am delighted to announce that Cathy Kennedy, OUP’s Senior Publisher for Journals, has just written to me as follows: “Oxford University Press is delighted to support the Open Citation Corpus initiative in the interest of furthering and disseminating scholarship.

I am delighted to announce that Cathy Kennedy

 ,

OUP’s Senior Publisher for Journals, has just written to me as follows: “Oxford University Press is delighted to support the Open Citation Corpus initiative in the interest of furthering and disseminating scholarship.

Oxford University Press to support Open Citations

The JISC, in response to its invitation to tender, has recently funded Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Ltd, a research and strategy consultancy, to undertake an independent study entitled Access to Citation Data: A Cost-Benefit and Risk Review and Forward Look.

The JISC, in response to its invitation to tender, has recently funded Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Ltd, a research and strategy consultancy, to undertake an independent study entitled

 Access to Citation Data: A Cost-Benefit and Risk Review and Forward Look

.  Evidence gathering for the study has just started, and the consultants are due to produce a report on this subject by next February.

Access to Citation Data

Bibliographic references are the links that knit together independent scholarly endeavours.

Nature to open its reference list data

Why should the publishers of subscription-access journals, who presently generate income from the sale of access to peer-reviewed full text scholarly articles, be willingly open the reference lists of these articles, and contribute these to the Open Citations Corpus for publication as open linked data?

Why should the publishers of subscription-access journals, who presently generate income from the sale of access to peer-reviewed full text scholarly articles, be willingly open the reference lists of these articles, and contribute these to the Open Citations Corpus for publication as open linked data? I would like to suggest the following reasons:  1. There is a general move towards open data, which is widely regarded as a common good.

Why publishers should open their references

To accompany today’s publication in D-Lib Magazine of the article The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles – a framework for article evaluation highlighted in the previous post, I have today also published The Five Stars Ontology, a simple ontology written in OWL 2 DL that forms part of SPAR, a suite of Semantic Publishing … Continue reading Five Stars Ontology

To accompany today’s publication in D-Lib Magazine of the article The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles – a framework for article evaluation highlighted in the previous post, I have today also published The Five Stars Ontology, a simple ontology written in OWL 2 DL that forms part of SPAR, a suite of Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies.

Five Stars Ontology

In the previous post, I outlined reasons why researchers don’t publish data, presented as evidence to the Royal Society’s Policy Study “Science as a Public Enterprise” Call for Evidence.

IBRG projects to facilitate data publication and data citation

Evidence submitted by David Shotton in response to the Royal Society’s Policy Study “Science as a Public Enterprise” Call for Evidence, addressing the following two topics raised by that call: Getting Researcher buy-in. How do we get researchers to be more willing to share data?

Evidence submitted by David Shotton in response to the Royal Society’s Policy Study “Science as a Public Enterprise” Call for Evidence, addressing the following two topics raised by that call:

 Getting Researcher buy-in.

How do we get researchers to be more willing to share data? What is there to be learned from disciplines such as genomics which have norms which favour wide sharing of data?

Why researchers don’t publish data

Executive summary


 Introduction

To general readers of this blog, this post will appear different from normal posts. Rather than being about a particular topic, it pulls together a summary of the work undertaken over the past year within the Open Citations Project supported by the JISC, and is primarily intended to assist JISC evaluation of the project and its outputs.

JISC Open Citations Project &#8211; Final Project Blog Post

Reis et al. (2008) [1] cites an earlier paper from Albert Ko’s research group, Ko et al. (1999) [2]. In conventional parlance, as the following diagram shows, the word “reference” can mean either what is found in the text, what is found in the reference list, the act of citation, or the object of the … Continue reading Nomenclature for citations and references

Reis

 et al

. (2008) [1] cites an earlier paper from Albert Ko’s research group, Ko

 et al

. (1999) [2]. In conventional parlance, as the following diagram shows, the word “reference” can mean either what is found in the text, what is found in the reference list, the act of citation, or the object of the citation itself, as in the sentence “All the references you will need to prepare for the journal club are on Kevin’s desk”.

Nomenclature for citations and references

The input PubMed Central Open Access subset XML reference data, our starting corpus, were transformed into Open Citations RDF in multiple stages: The original XML was first transformed into an intermediate form using XSLT.

The citation processing pipeline and the Open Citations Corpus

In a recent blog post, Heather Piwowar, in discussing the advantages of citing datasets in the reference list of the article, said “No journals have standardized on this approach so far”. However, Pensoft Journals, a publisher that specializes in publishing biodiversity and biological systematics papers, and that has taken the lead in promoting the publication … Continue reading Pensoft Journals policy and author guidelines on data publication

In a recent blog post, Heather Piwowar, in discussing the advantages of citing datasets in the reference list of the article, said “No journals have standardized on this approach so far”. However, Pensoft Journals, a publisher that specializes in publishing biodiversity and biological systematics papers, and that has taken the lead in promoting the publication of datasets with DOIs, has exactly such a policy.

Pensoft Journals policy and author guidelines on data publication and citation

DataCite is an international organisation, founded in 2009, which promotes the use of DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for published datasets, in order to establish easier access to research data, to increase acceptance of research data as legitimate contributions in the scholarly record, and to support data archiving to permit results to be verified and re-purposed … Continue reading Questions of granularity – Dryad’s use of DataCite DOIs for

DataCite is an international organisation, founded in 2009, which promotes the use of DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for published datasets, in order to establish easier access to research data, to increase acceptance of research data as legitimate contributions in the scholarly record, and to support data archiving to permit results to be verified and re-purposed for future study. Its founding members were the British Library;

Questions of granularity &#8211; Dryad&#8217;s use of DataCite DOIs for data citation, and the Annotation Ontology

In the previous blog post, I made a textual comparison between BIBO v1.3, the Bibliographic Ontology developed by Bruce D’Arcus and Frédérick Giasson, and FaBiO, the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology.

BIBO2SPAR, an RDF Mapping of BIBO to the SPAR Ontologies

FRBR, the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records [1] is a general model, proposed by the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA), for describing bibliographic documents. It works for both physical and digital resources and has proved to be very flexible and powerful.

FRBR, the

 Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records

[1] is a general model, proposed by the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA), for describing bibliographic documents. It works for both physical and digital resources and has proved to be very flexible and powerful. One of the most important aspect of FRBR is the fact that it is not associated with a particular metadata schema or implementation.

Extending FRBR within FaBiO

CiTO v2.0 contains just two main object properties, cito:cites and its inverse cito:isCitedBy, each of which as thirty-two sub-properties. Intentionally, these properties are not constrained as to domain or range, thereby maximising their applicability in a wide range of citation contexts.

CiTO v2.0 contains just two main object properties,

 cito:cites

and its inverse

 cito:isCitedBy

, each of which as thirty-two sub-properties. Intentionally, these properties are not constrained as to domain or range, thereby maximising their applicability in a wide range of citation contexts.

Functional clustering of CiTO properties

Egon Willighagen, at Uppsala University, has pioneered the use of object properties from CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology, to characterize bibliographic citations in CiteULike, the free service for managing and discovering scholarly references.  Indeed, it was his use case that persuaded me of the need to generalize CiTO to include indirect citations.

Use of CiTO in CiteULike

One of the biggest challenges faced by modern scientists is information overload. The life sciences are probably the area most affected by it, with almost a million new entries being added to PubMed each year. While on-line publishing and bibliographic search engines have made the problem of finding individual research articles considerably easier, the present … Continue reading JISC Open Citations: Wider Benefits to Sector &amp;

One of the biggest challenges faced by modern scientists is information overload. The life sciences are probably the area most affected by it, with almost a million new entries being added to PubMed each year.

JISC Open Citations: Wider Benefits to Sector &amp; Achievements for Host Institution

The Open Citations Project is global in scope, designed to change the face of scientific publishing. It aims to make bibliographic citation links as easy to use as Web links. Its goals are three-fold: To establish OpenCitations.net, a public RDF triplestore for biomedical literature citations.

JISC Open Citations: Aims, Objectives and Final Outputs

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 look ahead: OpenCitations’ achievements in 2023

We announce the August 2022 release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, which is based on open references to works with DOIs within the Crossref dump dated August 2022.

We announce the August 2022 release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, which is based on open references to works with DOIs within the Crossref dump dated August 2022. This new release extends COCI with more than 48 million additional citations, giving a total number of more than 1.36 billion DOI-to-DOI citation links.

Additional 48 million citations in COCI, including references from IEEE 

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 French National Fund for Open Science renews its support to OpenCitations

After months of work behind the scenes, we’re thrilled to unveil the new OpenCitations website!   Whether you’re a researcher, service provider, librarian, or open knowledge advocate, we want the new site to help you engage more easily and meaningfully with our work. This new website is part of a wider rebranding initiative that began earlier … Continue reading Welcome to the new OpenCitations website!

After months of work behind the scenes, we’re thrilled to unveil the new OpenCitations website!   Whether you’re a researcher, service provider, librarian, or open knowledge advocate, we want the new site to help you engage more easily and meaningfully with our work. This new website is part of a wider

 rebranding initiative

that began earlier this year.

Welcome to the new OpenCitations website!

When navigating our social media platforms in the past three days, you may have noticed a blurred and colourful spot in the place of our usual logo.

Announcing the new OpenCitations Logo: a fresh look to reflect our vision

The Founder and Co-Director of OpenCitations, Prof. David M. Shotton, peacefully passed away on Saturday, 18th May, after a long battle against illness. With his death, OpenCitations lost a Director, a Mentor, and a Guide.

The Founder and Co-Director of OpenCitations, Prof. David M. Shotton, peacefully passed away on Saturday, 18th May, after a long battle against illness. With his death, OpenCitations lost a Director, a Mentor, and a Guide. OpenCitations wouldn’t have existed without David’s foresight, which led him to design the first prototype of OpenCitations as a one-year project founded by JISC in 2010.

Remembering David M. Shotton, Founder and Co-Director of OpenCitations

OpenCitations and the Barcelona Declaration are happy to announce that the call for participation and contributions to the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2025 is now open.

OpenCitations and the Barcelona Declaration are happy to announce that the

 call for participation and contributions

to the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2025 is now open.  After the success of the 2023 edition, this edition of the

 Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC)

will take place in

 Bologna

, on

 28-29 May 2025

. – https://workshop-oc.github.io.

Apply now to the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2025: the call for participation and contributions is open! 

If you are a leader of a Library or a Research Institution and would like to learn more about the existing open infrastructures that could help your institution to evolve in the research environment, but you don’t know where to look for, you can now use Infra Finder, a brand-new tool aimed at foster discovery, … Continue reading Find OpenCitations on Infra Finder, a new tool to discover and support Open Infrastructures

If you are a leader of a Library or a Research Institution and would like to learn more about the existing open infrastructures that could help your institution to evolve in the research environment, but you don’t know where to look for, you can now use Infra Finder, a brand-new tool aimed at foster discovery, adoption, and investment for open infrastructure services.

Find OpenCitations on Infra Finder, a new tool to discover and support Open Infrastructures

OpenCitations is seeking applicants for a one-year Research Fellow position to be held from April 2023, for which the application closing deadline is 28 February 2023.  Currently, the amount and complexity of the data made available by OpenCitations opens up several issues related to the improvement, scalability and optimisation of its infrastructure.

OpenCitations is seeking applicants for a

 one-year Research Fellow position

to be held from April 2023, for which the application

 closing deadline is 28 February 2023

.  Currently, the amount and complexity of the data made available by OpenCitations opens up several issues related to the improvement, scalability and optimisation of its infrastructure.

OpenCitations is hiring: one-year Research Fellow position now open

Since its inauguration in 2010, OpenCitations has always granted free access to its services to users throughout the world, with no requirement for registration or sign-up. Programmatic access to OpenCitations data can be obtained either via our SPARQL endpoints and our REST APIs.

OpenCitations Access Tokens: how they work and why they are important

“What role does ‘open’ play in making this project special?” This apparently easy, but not banal, question was asked in the Open Publishing Awards nomination form, and at OpenCitations we prefaced our answer to it by stating “For OpenCitations, ‘open’ is the crucial value and the final purpose.” We consider the free availability of bibliographic … Continue reading OpenCitations receives the Open Publishing Award in Open Data

“

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

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

OpenCitations receives the Open Publishing Award in Open Data

The incentives for new OpenCitations innovative solutions Two years ago, in their canonical 2020 QSS paper on OpenCitations, Silvio Peroni and David Shotton anticipated the creation of the new database, OpenCitations Meta, able to “offer a faster and richer service” by storing bibliographic metadata “in house”. Meta would “avoid duplication of data by efficiently permitting … Continue reading OpenCitations and EC funding: OpenAIRE Nexus and

The incentives for new OpenCitations innovative solutions Two years ago, in their canonical 2020 QSS paper on OpenCitations, Silvio Peroni and David Shotton anticipated the creation of the new database, OpenCitations Meta, able to “offer a faster and richer service” by storing bibliographic metadata “in house”. Meta would “

 avoid duplication of data by efficiently permitting us to keep […] a single copy of the metadata for each of the

OpenCitations and EC funding: OpenAIRE Nexus and RISIS2

Guest post by Arcangelo Massari, University of Bologna In this post, Arcangelo Massari, who recently graduated in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge under Professor Silvio Peroni at the University of Bologna, shares the results of his master thesis.

Guest post by Arcangelo Massari, University of Bologna

 In this post, Arcangelo Massari, who recently graduated in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge under Professor Silvio Peroni at the University of Bologna, shares the results of his master thesis.

A particular problem in information retrieval is that of obtaining data from an evolving dataset, independent of the time at which that item of data was added, changed or removed.

Performing live time-traversal queries on RDF datasets

On September 27, OpenCitations’ director Silvio Peroni, together with Niels Stern (DOAB/OAPEN) and James MacGregor (PKP), held the online workshop “How Open Infrastructure Benefits Libraries” during the Open Access Tage 2021. Open-Access-Tage (Open Access Days) are the annual central platform for the steadily growing Open Access and Open Science community from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and are aimed at

On September 27, OpenCitations’ director Silvio Peroni, together with Niels Stern (DOAB/OAPEN) and James MacGregor (PKP), held the online workshop “How Open Infrastructure Benefits Libraries” during the Open Access Tage 2021. Open-Access-Tage (Open Access Days) are the annual central platform for the steadily growing

 Open Access and Open Science community from Germany, Austria and Switzerland

,

Open Access Tage 2021: valuable insights from the libraries in the German-speaking region 

In his call for open citations, Dario Taraborelli hailed the scholarly citation graph (in which the nodes (vertices) are individual academic publications and the links (edges) represent bibliographic citations from one publication to another) as one of humankind’s most important intellectual achievements.

Reflections on the global citation graph

We congratulate and thank Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, for endorsing the DORA Declaration on Research Assessment (https://sfdora.org/), thereby joining the hundreds of other publishers and scientific organizations which have endorsed DORA over the previous eight years, and also for making a commitment to open the references from all its journal articles submitted to … Continue reading Elsevier endorses DORA and opens its

We congratulate and thank Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, for endorsing the DORA Declaration on Research Assessment (https://sfdora.org/), thereby joining the hundreds of other publishers and scientific organizations which have endorsed DORA over the previous eight years, and also for making a commitment to open the references from all its journal articles submitted to Crossref.

Elsevier endorses DORA and opens its journal article reference lists

Last night I watched the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224), in which former employees of the big Silicon Valley social media companies expose the serious and sometimes tragic or even fatal consequences that social media may have on individual lives.

Last night I watched the Netflix documentary

 The Social Dilemma

(https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224), in which former employees of the big Silicon Valley social media companies expose the serious and sometimes tragic or even fatal consequences that social media may have on individual lives. These social media services are run by commercial companies under pressure from shareholders to make ever increasing profits.

The Social Dilemma and open academic analytics

For the second year, OpenCitations has taken part in the LIBER annual conference.  LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries) is a network that gathers 440 research libraries, based in more than 40 countries all over the world, with the mission of supporting Europe’s research libraries

For the second year, OpenCitations has taken part in the LIBER annual conference.

 LIBER

(Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries) is a network that gathers 440 research libraries, based in more than 40 countries all over the world, with the mission of supporting Europe’s research libraries

OpenCitations at LIBER Annual Conference 2021: ‘How Can Open Infrastructures Support the Role of Research Libraries?’

OpenCitations is proud to be part of the launch of the Initiative for Open Abstracts, a new cross-publisher initiative calling for the unrestricted availability of abstracts to boost the discovery of research.

The Initiative for Open Abstracts is launched

We have published the bi-monthly release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. In this latest release (dated 6 September 2020), we extended COCI with more than 11 million additional citations. Now, COCI contains more than 733 million DOI-to-DOI citation links between more than 59.4 million bibliographic entities.

Today, we have published the bi-monthly release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations.

More than 733M citations now available in COCI

We are excited to share that COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, was on 12 May 2020 extended with more than 47 million additional citations, and has reached a total number of more than 702 million DOI-to-DOI citation links between more than 58 million bibliographic entities.

We are excited to share that COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, was on 12 May 2020 extended with more than

 47 million additional citations

, and has reached a total number of more than

 702 million DOI-to-DOI citation links

between more than

 58 million bibliographic entities

. The citations added in this the fifth release of COCI came from the most recent Crossref

COCI has surpassed 700M citations

Rationale Readers of this blog will be familiar with Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs), described in an earlier post and formally defined in [1]. OCIs enable bibliographic citations, treated as first class information entities, to be uniquely identified and referenced, and are used to identify the &gt;624 million individual citations indexed in the latest release of … Continue reading Introducing InTRePIDs – In-Text Reference Pointer Identifiers

Rationale

Readers of this blog will be familiar with Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs), described in an earlier post and formally defined in [1]. OCIs enable bibliographic citations, treated as first class information entities, to be uniquely identified and referenced, and are used to identify the &gt;624 million individual citations indexed in the latest release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI

Introducing InTRePIDs – In-Text Reference Pointer Identifiers

OpenCitations is an infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data.

OpenCitations described

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 … Continue reading OpenCitations selected

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

OpenCitations blog