OpenCitations for Open Science

OpenCitations is an independent not-for-profit infrastructure for open scholarship dedicated to publication of open bibliographic and citation data by the use of Semantic Web technologies. It provides more than one billion citations data which can be reused for any purpose and can be accessed via SPARQL endpoints, REST APIs, and that can be downloaded in bulk. 

OpenCitations enables:

1. fairness since it negates institutions and independent scholars having to pay tens of thousands of dollars annually (that most of them cannot afford!) for commercial access to their own scholarly data;
2. reuse since there are no licence restrictions and all data are provided under CC0, so users can re-publish and reuse for any purpose the citation data that OpenCitations provides;
3. research assessment, since we provide open data usable for national and international research evaluation exercises, enabling transparency and reproducibility;
4. governance, since the community is directly involved in the evolution of the infrastructure.
   The citations available in our primary database COCI (the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations) are treated as first-class data entities, with accompanying properties including citation timespan, modeled according to the OpenCitations Data Model. 

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How is OpenCitations tool contributing to Open Knowledge?

OpenCitations: 

• provides (without charge under open licences) open metadata with scope, depth, accuracy and provenance, as a disruptive alternative to traditional proprietary citation indexes
• promotes researchers' impact, credibility and attribution, by giving credit and legal attribution to scholarly works by authors
• supports various standards formats for sharing data, and espouses FAIR, UNESCO, POSI, I4OC principles.

Know more:

Lightning talk from OSFAIR2021 "ScholeXplorer and OpenCitations as the new frontier of open citation indexing"

The Lightning Talk "ScholeXplorer and OpenCitations as the new frontier of open citation indexing" is a presentation by Silvio Peroni, co-authored with Paolo Manghi (OpenAIRE), Alessia Bardi (CNR-ISTI), and Sandro La Bruzzo (CNR-ISTI), describing two of the 14 open data services included in the MONITOR portfolio of the OpenAIRE-Nexus project that are used to monitor Open Science, research impact and open citations – the domains of interest of the two services presented.

Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2020

A 3-hour online workshop with invited speakers for researchers, scholarly publishers, funders, policy makers, and open citations advocates, who are interested in creation, reuse, and improvement, of open citation data and open scholarly metadata.

Blogpost authors: Chiara Di Giambattista, Silvio Peroni