OpenCitations are pleased to announce the launch of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) , a fresh momentum in the scholarly publishing world to open up data on the citations that link research publications.

In October 2015, I asked Silvio Peroni, my long-term colleague in the development of the SPAR Ontologies, to become Co-Director of the Open Citations Project, and to work with me in taking forward the prototype Open Citations Corpus (OCC), originally developed at the University of Oxford with the support of Jisc, with the aim of developing it into a production service of real use to scholars.

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.

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;

As part of the Open Citations project, we have been asked to review and improve the process of importing data into the Open Citations Corpus, taking the scripts from the initial project as our starting point. The current import procedure evolved from several disconnected processes and requires running multiple command line scripts and transforming the data into different intermediate formats.

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.

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

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.

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.

What is Related Work? Related Work is a user-friendly Web application developed to provide a means of browsing citation links, as the basis for a planned recommendation service for the best articles to read.

David writes: Dr Heinrich Hartman is a new colleague of mine, who, having been working in the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, has just returned to Germany to start a new job in a leading semantic web research group, that of Steffan Staab at the Institute for Web Science and Technologies, University of Koblenz-Landau.