Yesterday I gave a lightning talk at the 2021 OASPA Conference, with the title OpenCitations – what does the future hold? The poster accompanying my talk, published on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526713, is reproduced below.
Here is what I said:
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Most of the talks at this conference have focussed on open access to textual content. But open bibliographic metadata is also vitally important, not least to enable the calculation of metrics that are both open and reproducible.
OpenCitations is a not-for-profit open infrastructure that provides such free access to global scholarly citations. We hold dear the values and principles that underpin Open Science, and are early adopters of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) and the FAIR data principles.
Our largest citation index is COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, which currently indexes approximately 1.2 billion citations, released to the public domain under a CC0 waiver.
Our goal is for OpenCitations to provide open bibliographic citation information having scope, depth, accuracy and provenance that surpasses that of the commercial citation indexes, for access to which scholarly institutions presently pay enormous annual subscriptions.
I wish to mention just two of our planned developments:
OpenCitations Meta is a new database that will enable us to store in-house full bibliographic metadata about citing and cited publications. This will have two advantages: It will speed user queries, since we will no longer have to wait for responses to on-the-fly API calls to Crossref and ORCID to retrieve such metadata. More importantly, it will enable us to index the large number of references involving publications that do not have DOIs, something that for technical reasons is presently lacking.
Additionally, we plan to develop new citation indexes over other sources of open references, starting with DOCI, indexing references from DataCite, and NOCI, indexing the content of the NIH Open Citation Collection.
Our progress has until recently been severely manpower-limited. However, OpenCitations was fortunate to have been selected by SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services, as an open infrastructure providing a unique and valuable service, and worthy of crowdfunded financial support by the global stakeholder community of research institutes, academic libraries, funders and publishers.
As a result of the generous support so far provided or pledged by ~50 such institutions, we have already reached about one-third of our requested SCOSS budget, enabling us this year to appoint new staff to start our planned technical developments, to support our community outreach, and to help take our vision forward.
Such financial support is vital for our sustainability, since we generate no income from our provision of free data, services and software. We thus invite you too to contribute to OpenCitations.
However, we also seek community involvement in other ways: participation in the community-led governance of OpenCitations; help in developing our open source software and services; curatorial involvement to improve OpenCitations data; and collaborations with other like-minded infrastructures to develop federated access to open scholarly information of all types, thereby returning control over such information to the academic community that generated it in the first place.
If you would like to work with OpenCitations in any of these ways, please contact me.
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OpenCitations blog 