Seeking applicants for three-year research fellowship position

A year ago, at the end of 2019, OpenCitations was selected by the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS, https://scoss.org) for its second round of crowdfunding support, since SCOSS believes that OpenCitations aligns well with Open Science goals and is an innovative service. The goal of such support is to enable OpenCitations’ operations over the next three years as it transitions into a global scholarly infrastructure organization with a secure financial footing. As part of this work, we now plan to strengthen the current technical and computational infrastructure (server, parallel processing, backup, etc.) used by OpenCitations, which is currently hosted at the University of Bologna.

For this purpose, we now seek applicants for a new three-year research fellowship to be held from March 2021, for which the application closing deadline is 7 February 2021. The principal goals of this research fellowship are:

1. to study the current limitations of the OpenCitations infrastructure and introduce improvements, and
2. to design and implement new software control tools that will enable us to manage the infrastructure more efficiently.

Additionally, the selected research fellow will be expected to address issues relating to the provision of Web services, the management of distributed and heterogeneous databases, OpenCitations’ data conversion and ingestion processes involving parallel computing, and the overall security of the infrastructure. Particular attention will need to be given to data preservation and to the long-term maintenance and updating of the infrastructure.

The Call for Applications (in Italian and in English) is available online on the website of the University of Bologna. It also includes an attachment with a description of OpenCitations and of the activities related to the position. The position has a net salary (exempt from income tax, after deduction of social security contributions) in excess of 23K euros per year. As indicated in the Call for Applications, candidates need to apply exclusively through the University of Bologna web portal.