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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
- can be queried using the COCI SPARQL endpoint;
- can be retrieved by using the COCI REST API;
- can be searched by using the COCI Search Interface;
- are also available as dumps on Figshare in CSV, N-Triples, and Scholix; and
- can be freely re-used for any purpose.
OpenCitations blog 
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