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.
