OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship

TL;DR

OpenCitations provides an open, semantic web-based infrastructure for citation data, enhancing transparency, reproducibility, and accessibility in scholarly research through open datasets, tools, and services.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive open infrastructure for citation data using Semantic Web technologies, including datasets, ontologies, and APIs, as a disruptive alternative to proprietary indexes.

Findings

Over 445 million citations in COCI index

OpenCitations datasets are openly available in RDF format

Tools support searching, browsing, and API access to citation data

Abstract

OpenCitations is an infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open citation data as Linked Open Data using Semantic Web technologies, thereby providing a disruptive alternative to traditional proprietary citation indexes. Open citation data are valuable for bibliometric analysis, increasing the reproducibility of large-scale analyses by enabling publication of the source data. Following brief introductions to the development and benefits of open scholarship and to Semantic Web technologies, this paper describes OpenCitations and its datasets, tools, services and activities. These include the OpenCitations Data Model; the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies; OpenCitations' open software of generic applicability for searching, browsing and providing REST APIs over RDF triplestores; Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs) and the OpenCitations OCI Resolution Service; the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), a database of open downloadable bibliographic and citation data made available in RDF under a Creative Commons public domain dedication; and the OpenCitations Indexes of open citation data, of which the first and largest is COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref Open DOI-to-DOI Citations, which currently contains over 445 million bibliographic citations and is receiving considerable usage by the scholarly community.