OpenCitations Meta

TL;DR

OpenCitations Meta is a comprehensive, open, and interoperable bibliographic database that assigns persistent identifiers to scholarly publications, enhancing data quality, performance, and reuse in line with Open Science principles.

Contribution

It introduces a new database with globally persistent identifiers, internal metadata hosting, and automated curation, improving upon previous reliance on external APIs and ensuring data integrity.

Findings

Largest bibliographic metadata source using Semantic Web technologies

Automated data curation with deduplication and error correction

Enhanced performance and interoperability through internal hosting and standards

Abstract

OpenCitations Meta is a new database for open bibliographic metadata of scholarly publications involved in the citations indexed by the OpenCitations infrastructure, adhering to Open Science principles and published under a CC0 license to promote maximum reuse. It presently incorporates bibliographic metadata for publications recorded in Crossref, DataCite and PubMed, making it the largest bibliographic metadata source using Semantic Web technologies. It assigns new globally persistent identifiers (PIDs), known as OpenCitations Meta Identifiers (OMIDs) to all bibliographic resources, enabling it both to disambiguate publications described using different external PIDS (e.g., a DOI in Crossref and a PMID in PubMed), and to handle citations involving publications lacking external PIDs. By hosting bibliographic metadata internally, OpenCitations Meta eliminates its former reliance on API calls to external resources and thus enhances performance in response to user queries. Its automated data curation, following the OpenCitations Data Model, includes deduplication, error correction, metadata enrichment and full provenance tracking, ensuring transparency and traceability of data and bolstering confidence in data integrity, a feature unparalleled in other bibliographic databases. Its commitment to Semantic Web standards ensures superior interoperability compared to other machine-readable formats, with availability via a SPARQL endpoint, REST APIs and data dumps.