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Tag: Community

From the Community Survey to action: the OpenCitations Roadmap for 2026

In February, we published a blog post presenting the main outcomes of the Community Survey we conducted between October and December 2025 to help guide the future direction of OpenCitations. As we explained in that post, the data collection and analysis phase resulted in a report that we have made openly available on Zenodo. Following the publication of the report, the OpenCitations Team entered a phase of internal evaluation to define priorities for the coming year. In doing so, we carefully considered the need to ensure that OpenCitations continues to grow in a sustainable way, aligned with the capacity and resources of our team. 

As a first step in this process, the survey outcomes were presented at the International Advisory Board Meeting held in February. This meeting provided an opportunity for an open, constructive discussion of OpenCitations’ strategic direction. The feedback and reflections from that dialogue were fundamental in shaping the next stage of planning. Indeed, building on these discussions, a dedicated internal Task Force Meeting was then held to define the roadmap priorities. This meeting involved the Director, the CTO, the Research Manager, the Systems Administrator, and the Community Manager, who worked together to translate the survey insights and the International Advisory Board feedback into concrete strategic decisions. 

The starting point for this discussion was a slide highlighting three key areas of debate: 

  • Whether to prioritize facilitating the use of OpenCitations by improving interfaces, tutorials, and documentation or to focus primarily on expanding metadata coverage. 
  • Whether to reinforce the role of OpenCitations as a backend infrastructure, or to invest more effort in frontend development to increase its visibility. 
  • Whether to pursue a vertical growth model, focused on strengthening the existing core community, or a more horizontal approach aimed at achieving broader adoption across the research community. 

Based on these considerations, we decided to focus on a limited set of priorities for 2026. It’s important to note that the aspects that are not included in the most immediate roadmap should not be interpreted as being dismissed. On the contrary, since all these points originate from valuable feedback we received from the community, each of them represents an area that we intend to address in the future, in proportion to the size of our team and the resources available. We have thus defined a set of realistic objectives for the period M3–M12 of 2026 that are consistent with the nature of OpenCitations and with the work already underway. 

A key outcome of this planning phase is the decision to strengthen our engagement with the core community during 2026. One important step in this direction will be the development of tutorials tailored to specific use cases. For example, we plan to create a clear and comprehensive “Getting Started” tutorial to support Web developers in working with the OpenCitations APIs. At the same time, we will continue working on expanding our data coverage by pursuing the ingestion of new data sources. In particular, during 2026, we will integrate data from OUTCITE and MATILDA into OpenCitations.  

Among the use cases identified by the community, a particularly relevant one concerns semantic interoperability within research infrastructures. For this reason, we have decided to focus significantly on backend development in this area. This direction is consistent with the work we are already carrying out within the GRAPHIA project, where the implementation of a REST API endpoint compliant with the Scientific Knowledge Graph – Interoperability Framework (SKG-IF, https://skg-if.github.io) represents one of the key assets, with the aim of defining a common mechanism for interoperability across open scholarly infrastructures. The SKG-IF recommendation includes the definition of a shared exchange format, interoperability mechanisms based on SPAR ontologies, a common validation approach, and an API specification.  

Finally, one activity that sits at the intersection between backend development and coverage expansion is the work we are conducting with TIB Hannover and OJS on crowdsourcing citation data. PKP, OpenCitations, and TIB have started implementing a workflow within OJS to support this effort. In particular, TIB has developed an OJS plugin that enables the ingestion of citations from OJS journals directly into OpenCitations. During 2025, OpenCitations has been working on the development of an automated crowdsourcing workflow that will allow these citations to be directly integrated into our collections. 

All these activities have been collected, together with their respective timelines, within our public roadmap, which remains the main reference point for monitoring the progress of OpenCitations development:  https://trello.com/b/RprHYoKL/opencitations  

Now that the analysis and planning process related to the Community Survey has reached its conclusion, we would like to renew our sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to it. We are grateful to the members of our community who responded so thoughtfully to the survey, to the partners who helped disseminate it, and to the members of the International Advisory Board who supported both the design of the survey and the strategic reflections that followed. The dense and coherent roadmap that has emerged from this process is the result of a collective effort. It reflects OpenCitations’ commitment to listening to its community and turning those insights into concrete objectives that will guide our work, to strengthen the open availability of open metadata and the interoperability between research infrastructures.  

Growing in complexity: why OpenCitations needed a new Governance Model

Since 2019, OpenCitations has undergone a period of significant growth and consolidation, becoming a far more complex and interconnected infrastructure. What began as a focused service has grown into a key component of the global Open Science ecosystem, embedded in a dense network of relationships and long-term commitments involving its community, its members, and the University of Bologna. As this complexity increased, it became clear that the original governance framework could no longer fully reflect or support the reality in which OpenCitations now operates, and that needed to evolve accordingly. We are pleased to finally share the outcomes of this governance evolution process, a natural response to the growth and increasing complexity of OpenCitations over the last few years. This new governance model is the most logical and necessary evolution of the infrastructure, responding to the need to recognize and formalize the responsibilities, expectations, and mutual commitments that have developed over time, while providing a structure capable of sustaining them in the long term. 

The starting point can be traced back to OpenCitations’ selection by SCOSS for the 2019–2022 funding cycle. At that time, the Rules of Membership established a three-year membership duration, in line with the timeframe of the SCOSS support. While this structure was appropriate for the initial phase, the conclusion of the SCOSS cycle highlighted the need for greater flexibility in membership commitments and for governance rules better suited to a more mature and complex organization.

During the same period, OpenCitations joined intentional projects (e.g. OpenAIRE) and was included in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), an ecosystem to which the University of Bologna also contributes as an associate member. With the end of the SCOSS-supported triennium, several governance-related issues emerged. These included the need for a clearer and more robust institutional framework, as well as the formalization and verifiability of the in-kind support provided by the University of Bologna.

The International Advisory Board for OpenCitations played a key role in shaping the discussion around these challenges. In particular, it emphasized the importance of strengthening OpenCitations’ autonomy, reducing its dependence on the Director’s role, and establishing a governance structure that would be transparent, sustainable, and resilient over time. With the guidance of the Legal Office of the University of Bologna, a strategic decision was made to revise and strengthen the internal departmental framework hosting OpenCitations, rather than creating a separate external legal entity. This approach allowed for the definition of a stable, long-term organizational structure while remaining consistent with internationally recognized Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). Within this context, a dedicated working group of the International Advisory Board identified the core elements of the new governance model.

These include the formalization of the hosting membership currently exercised by the University of Bologna through ReCOSM, and the establishment of a Trustee Network. This network is designed to monitor OpenCitations’ adherence to Open Science principles and to safeguard its independence and autonomy. Public bodies and non-profit organizations with a demonstrated commitment to Open Science, or with a clear interest in supporting the infrastructure, may join this network. In addition, a transparent procedure was defined to regulate the potential transfer of the infrastructure in the event that the University of Bologna were ever to discontinue its support.

As part of the revised governance framework, the membership plan was also restructured to better reflect the nature of OpenCitations’ sustainability model. The University of Bologna was formally integrated into the membership scheme as an in-kind hosting member, recognizing its central role in providing institutional support and infrastructure. At the same time, the membership levels were simplified, moving from three tiers to two: Strategic Members, who contribute more substantially to the long-term sustainability and direction of the infrastructure, and Supporting Members, who provide financial support aligned with their capacity and interest. In this new framework, one-off or unrestricted donations are no longer included as a mechanism for supporting OpenCitations.

Working closely with the Legal Officers of the University of Bologna, the new principles were translated into concrete governance instruments. New Rules of Membership and Organizational Structure were drafted to replace the previous Rules of Membership and Organizational Bodies and Finances. In parallel, a new OpenCitations Participation Agreement was prepared, incorporating the revised membership framework and replacing the existing Memorandum of Understanding. This process culminated in the formal approval of the new governance model by the OpenCitations Council, which endorsed the proposed framework through an online vote held between 9 and 13 February. 

The adoption of this new model provides OpenCitations with a clearer and more robust institutional foundation. We believe it will help in strengthening its accountability, reducing reliance on individual roles, and aligning the organization with established best practices for the sustainability of Open Science infrastructures. Above all, it embodies a shared commitment by the OpenCitations community to ensure that the infrastructure can continue to operate transparently in service of researchers, institutions, and the whole academic community for the years ahead.

OpenCitations is a plural: insights from the OpenCitations Community Survey

At OpenCitations, we have always described ourselves as community-driven and community-governed infrastructure. This definition deeply reflects our nature, since OpenCitations was born as a non-profit Open Science infrastructure to support open scholarship for the benefit of the scholarly community, and it continues to rely on that same community for its sustainability and governance, through memberships and participation in strategic decision-making processes. 

For this reason, it is essential for us that both our technical development and our outreach activities remain aligned with the real needs of the academic community. Over the past year, we have focused on strengthening our technical infrastructure and increasing awareness of OpenCitations’ values and activities. We are now entering a phase in which future priorities and developments need to be defined, at a time when the landscape of open citation services has become more crowded and complex. This makes it increasingly important for OpenCitations to clarify its positioning within the research ecosystem. 

To address this need, we came up with a simple insight: instead of assuming what the community needs, we decided to ask directly. This intuition led to the idea of launching a Community Survey. Developed with the support and guidance of the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, the survey was open to anyone in the academic community, including users, members, and people encountering OpenCitations for the first time. It was intentionally broad, covering both technical and outreach aspects. Its goal was not to evaluate performance, but to better understand how OpenCitations is perceived, used, and expected to evolve. 

The survey was open from 20 October to 16 December 2025, and we would like to sincerely thank everyone who took the time to respond and to help disseminate it within their networks. The feedback we received was of high quality, showing a strong level of engagement and a genuine willingness to provide thoughtful answers, especially through the open-ended questions. 

Respondents came from a wide range of backgrounds, primarily within academia and research, including researchers, librarians, information specialists, developers, and professionals working on research infrastructures and scholarly communication. Affiliations were mostly universities, research institutes, libraries, and non-profit infrastructures, reflecting a community already closely connected to Open Science practices. Levels of familiarity with OpenCitations varied considerably, from regular users to people who discovered the infrastructure for the first time through the survey. 

Across responses, OpenCitations was consistently associated with strong values such as openness, transparency, reproducibility, and independence from commercial interests. A recurring theme is the trust in the quality of the data and in the team maintaining the infrastructure. At the same time, awareness of specific services was uneven. While bibliographic and citation databases are relatively well known, more technical components such as APIs, data models, and SPARQL endpoints are mainly familiar to technically experienced users. 

This perception was reflected by usage patterns: OpenCitations often operates behind the scenes, with its data adopted within repositories and other scholarly tools. Citation analysis and metrics are another common use case, where OpenCitations is valued as an open alternative data source to proprietary databases. More specialised applications, such as knowledge graph construction and editorial workflows, were also mentioned, highlighting the flexibility of open citation data. 

When it comes to choosing OpenCitations over other databases, one of the strongest motivations is alignment with Open Science values. Respondents repeatedly emphasised the importance of open licences and the public-good orientation of the infrastructure. At the same time, several barriers remain, concerning in particular the limited coverage in certain areas, delays in data updates, technical complexity, and fragmented documentation. Another limit to adoption is the lack of awareness, together with institutional reliance on commercial databases. 

Regarding community engagement, awareness of OpenCitations often spreads through informal academic networks, conferences, workshops, and mailing lists. Active participation, however, remains limited, since many respondents follow OpenCitations’ activities without directly engaging. Still, there is a clear interest in deeper involvement, especially when it comes to contributing to Open Science, learning new skills, and aligning with institutional priorities around openness and transparency. 

Looking ahead, respondents expressed strong expectations around the expansion and enrichment of citation data, improved interoperability with other infrastructures, tutorials to support non-technical users, and more user-friendly interfaces. 

We are very glad to have opened this dialogue with the community. While some of the feedback confirmed issues we were already aware of, the survey also revealed we had not fully considered, particularly regarding how OpenCitations is perceived within the broader community. Overall, the Community Survey confirms that OpenCitations is widely recognised as a valuable and trustworthy open infrastructure for open science. At the same time, it highlights concrete areas for improvement, especially in usability, coverage, and community engagement. 

We see this survey not as a conclusion, but as a starting point for ongoing dialogue. The detailed results of the survey, including charts and word clouds, are available on Zenodo for public consultation:   

Di Giambattista, C., & Peroni, S. (2026). Summary Report of the OpenCitations Community Survey 2025. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18470862 

This survey now opens a phase of reflection that will inform future steps in our roadmap, and may also lead us to repeat this experiment in the future, exploring alternative formats for community engagement beyond surveys. Above all, we look forward to sharing concrete outcomes of this collaborative process with the community, as we continue to build OpenCitations with the community and for the community. 

 

Shape the future of OpenCitations: take our Community Survey

OpenCitations has always existed thanks to and for its community, a diverse network of institutions and individuals who believe in the value of open scholarly data.

As a community-based open infrastructure, our strength lies in collaboration. The insights, feedback, and experiences shared by our community partners are what help us refine our services and keep our mission aligned with the evolving global research ecosystem.

To continue building an infrastructure that truly reflects the needs of the scholarly community, we’ve now launched the OpenCitations Community Survey.

Whether you are a supporter, a partner institution, a user, or have simply come across OpenCitations by chance (even if you’ve never used our data or looked closely at what we do), this survey is your opportunity to share your experience, tell us what works, what could be improved, and what you’d like to see in the future.

Your insights will directly inform how we evolve our services and activities to better support your work, research, tools and, more generally, the circulation of open knowledge.

It takes about 10 minutes to complete, and every single response helps us strengthen OpenCitations as a community-driven open infrastructure.

👉 Take the survey and help shape the future of OpenCitations:
https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/GYSZ230686

GRAPHIA Project Launched in January 2025

OPERAS hosted the launch of the GRAPHIA project in Brussels earlier this year. On the 22nd and 23rd January, 2025, 21 partner institutions met in OPERAS’ office and online to celebrate the project which is funded by the European Commission for over €8 million, plus an additional €1.6 million from the Switzerland State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation. GRAPHIA aims to create the first comprehensive Social Science and Humanities (SSH) Knowledge Graph designed to integrate fragmented data into a unified entry point. The focus will be on disciplines within SSH, which contribute essential knowledge to society influencing culture, economics and ethical decisions among other factors. The project is expected to run from January 2025 to December 2027.

OPERAS coordinates the project with the purpose of significantly improving SSH data visualisation and analysis capacities through pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. The project addresses gaps in provision that leave SSH knowledge disconnected and poorly available. This will be accomplished by leveraging AI to create a Knowledge Graph that will deliver an expansive representation of knowledge in the diverse disciplines within SSH. GRAPHIA will empower researchers to uncover patterns and insight from unstructured data, illuminating social phenomena and cultural trends with clarity that is not available in current solutions.  

A major highlight of GRAPHIA will be an SSH Citation Index, an innovative framework for citation data extraction and enrichment to accelerate access to previous literature across the range of SSH disciplines. GRAPHIA integrates industry partners into this project to amplify the project’s impact by gaining the perspective and expertise from a range of stakeholders, reflecting the influence of SSH disciplines on society. Such collaboration will motivate innovations that apply to academics while being commercially viable, opening SSH disciplines and solutions to new markets and technologies. GRAPHIA is the signal of its partner organisations commitment to open science and increasing EU research infrastructures capabilities, enhancing global competitiveness, while facilitating broad and long-lasting impact of project results.

Part of OpenCitations’ personnel working at the University of Bologna is involved in GRAPHIA for the development of tools to enable data extraction from PDFs, and OpenCitations itself serves in the project as a source of information for the Knowledge Graph.

To follow the progress of the GRAPHIA project, join us on Bluesky and/or LinkedIn 

Contact GRAPHIA at: [email protected]

 

The Dutch Research Council sustains OpenCitations

We are most grateful to the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for its commitment to sustaining the activities and developments of three SCOSS-selected infrastructures (PKP, OpenCitations and ROR) together with the Netherlands Reproducibility Network.

The selected infrastructures have been evaluated as “essential for a high-quality open science communication system”, and part of a network that “helps to promote reproducibility and strengthens the transition to open science”. OpenCitations, in particular, plays a strong role in reducing “the reliance on commercial products for doing bibliometric research and citation measurement” by providing an open database of citations.

This pledge carries out NWO’s enhancement of Open Science policy, as part of its strategy 2023-2026. The Dutch Research Council aims to support and encourage projects that put Open Science into practice, thus contributing to the transition towards a healthier research culture.

The yearly funding of 8000 EUR (year 2023-2025) will help us realise our planned future developments. Thank you, NWO!

The French National Fund for Open Science renews its support to OpenCitations

We are delighted to announce that the French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) has renewed its commitment to sustaining the activities of four SCOSS-selected infrastructures, including OpenCitations. 

The four supported infrastructures (OpenCitations, the DOAB, LA Referencia and ROR) “were evaluated by the jury composed by SCOSS, then according to the exemplary criteria of the Committee for the Open Science, which notably guarantee transparency and the participation of the scientific communities in their governance”.

Since 2020, the FNSO has acknowledged OpenCitations as an infrastructure worth its financial support, thanks to its mission of disseminating bibliographic and citation metadata in open access with a level of quality and coverage, thus providing a workable, free and open alternative to the academic community’s current dependency on proprietary tools. OpenCitations’ work therefore frees up citation analysis, promotes the evolution of bibliometric indicators and the broadening knowledge of science.

The FNSO is now contributing to OpenCitations with recurring funding for 2023, 2024 and 2025 for an annual amount of €75,000. This generous support will be crucial in sustaining the maintenance and development of OpenCitations’ technical infrastructure, and in supporting the future activities of the OpenCitations team, that are publicly displayed in the OpenCitations Roadmap. 

We are extremely honoured and grateful to the French National Fund for Open Science for renewing the pledge of such a portion of its open science budget to support our work. 

Please help with OpenCitations’ entry in Wikipedia

The Wikipedia entry for OpenCitations is woefully out of date, inaccurate and brief. As Directors of OpenCitations, Silvio and I are unable to improve this situation because of Wikipedia’s proper conflict-of-interest restriction on self-promotion.

OpenCitations is actively seeking greater involvement from members of the global academic community, as explained in our Mission Statement. One way in which such individuals, particularly those who are both existing Wikipedia editors and already know about OpenCitations, can help OpenCitations, while at the same time supporting Wikipedia in its quest for accurate information, is by revising and expanding the present Wikipedia entry on OpenCitations to reflect the infrastructure’s current activities and data holdings, while maintaining perspective and a neutral point of view. This will increase the availability of reliable knowledge about OpenCitations and its place in the ecosystem of Open Science infrastructures.

Background information to assist in this task is available in the cannonical paper describing OpenCitations:

Silvio Peroni and David Shotton (2020). OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship. Quantitative Science Studies 1: 428-444. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00023;

in previous posts in the OpenCitations Blog and in the documents to which those posts link, particularly in:

Transparency meets open citations

The OpenCitations Roadmap is now publicly available on Trello

OpenCitations receives the Open Publishing Award in Open Data

Coverage of open citation data approaches parity with Web of Science and Scopus;

additionally from:

The OpenCitations Github software and information repository, from which the OpenCitations logo can be obtained;

and also from OpenCitations’ recent toots on Mastodon.

We await your work with anticipation!!