Open Infrastructure – OpenCitations blog

OpenCitations’ renewed compliance with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (April 2026)

OpenCitations has formally adopted the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) since its first self-assessment in August 2021. At that time, we had only recently been included in the SCOSS funding round and, although we had a clear vision of what we wanted to build and the role we wanted to play within the Open Science ecosystem, both our financial and human resources were still very limited. For this reason, the POSI self-assessment proved to be an important exercise, since it allowed us to critically reflect on both the strengths we could build upon and the weaknesses we needed to address as we developed OpenCitations into a sustainable, community-governed Open Science infrastructure.

That first assessment highlighted some key areas of attention. In particular, it highlighted the limited executive power of the community bodies involved in governance, as well as challenges related to long-term financial sustainability, particularly the ability to generate and manage financial surpluses.

Between 2021 and 2026, OpenCitations has evolved significantly, becoming a more complex infrastructure by expanding both the services it offers and the number of data sources it integrates. During this period, we have also expanded our team, worked on the development of a container-based infrastructure, and relaunched our governance framework.

These developments made it necessary to update our POSI self-assessment. This update is also timely, given the recent release of POSI Version 2 in October 2025. The new version of the principles is the result of a collective effort by POSI adopters and includes several clarifications to existing principles (for example, around the concept of lobbying and the distinction between transparent governance and transparent operations). In addition, new principles have been introduced to better reflect how scholarly infrastructures operate within the broader research ecosystem.

We are therefore happy to share our updated POSI self-assessment, which provides a comprehensive snapshot of OpenCitations as of April 2026. At the same time, it represents a renewed declaration of our commitment to the POSI principles.

Disclaimer. As with many early POSI adopters, our previous assessment used a traffic-light system to indicate the level of alignment with each principle. In this system:

Green indicates that the principle is fully met and evidenced in practice.

Yellow indicates that the principle is partially met, with active steps underway to achieve full alignment.

Red indicates that the principle is not currently met, or that compliance is not feasible.

During the POSI Version 2 working group discussions, it emerged that the use of this traffic-light system is not mandatory for POSI self-assessments. Nevertheless, we have decided to maintain this approach, as we believe it remains particularly effective as a communication tool and, at the same time, ensures continuity with our previous assessment. We have, however, taken the liberty of adding one more element: a symbol to indicate where we were already “green” in 2021, but have further improved our performance.

The symbol is therefore a “plus” placed next to the green traffic light.

Coverage across the scholarly enterprise

OpenCitations demonstrates broad coverage by collecting citation data from global scholarship, ensuring representation across disciplines, geographic areas, and research communities. The scope of OpenCitations’ coverage is universal, not limited to a particular scholarly domain, nor to the English language, nor restricted by imposed acceptance criteria.

Stakeholder governed

Governance is structured to reflect the stakeholder community, with the International Advisory Board elected by the Council of members and responsible for approving the Trustee Network. For more information: https://opencitations.net/governance/

Non-discriminatory participation or membership

Membership is open to all individuals and organisations that support Open Science principles, enabling inclusive and non-discriminatory participation in line with OpenCitations’ founding values.

Transparent governance

OpenCitations maintains a high level of transparency by publicly documenting its organisational structure, governance processes, and decision-making procedures. Reports and relevant documentation are shared with the community, including annual reports and the Rules of Membership and Organizational Bodies.

Cannot lobby

OpenCitations does not engage in political or financial lobbying activities. Its role remains focused on supporting the scholarly community without pursuing regulatory changes that would advantage its own position.

Living will

A clear long-term stewardship strategy is in place, ensuring that data, services, and infrastructure can be responsibly transferred if needed. This is supported by a recently implemented fully replicable technical infrastructure and a new governance model designed to facilitate handover thanks to the presence of the Trustee Network, which is capable of appointing new hosting members to physically and administratively host the infrastructure.

Regular review of purpose and community value

OpenCitations has recently monitored its relevance and community value through mechanisms such as community surveys. In addition, it has established governance and technical strategies to support a responsible wind-down process, including, if necessary, the transfer of assets and infrastructure through its Trustee Network. Additionally, the Trustee Network is responsible for regularly monitoring OpenCitations’ adherence to its mission and values, as well as its annual activities and finances.

Transparent operations

OpenCitations ensures a high level of operational transparency by openly providing key documentation, including financial reports, a public roadmap, a mission statement and value proposition, a sustainability model and fee structure, and privacy policies.

Time-limited funds used only for time-limited activities

Grant income is restricted to funding specific, time-limited projects, including the appointment of personnel working on them, while core operations are not dependent on such funding.

Goal to generate surplus

Thanks to memberships and donations, as well as in-kind support from the University of Bologna, OpenCitations has recently achieved the financial capacity to ensure stability until 2029, at least, in terms of funds allocated for staff salaries and technical operational expenses.

Establish and maintain financial reserves guided by policy

Although OpenCitations has reached a level of financial stability that ensures a budget surplus, there is currently no formal financial policy defining the amount of reserves to be allocated for a transition or wind-down plan, or to address exceptional or unforeseen events. However, OpenCitations has already initiated the necessary consultations to develop a Financial Reserve Policy, which will not only define the level and management of reserves but also provide a clear framework for handling revenues. In addition, it will establish and formalise procedures for approving both budget forecasts and actual expenditures.

Mission-consistent revenue generation

Revenue generation is aligned with the organisation’s mission (in particular, the value proposition according to which “external financial support is required from the stakeholder community to support OpenCitations and enable it to expand its delivery of high-quality comprehensive open bibliographic and citation metadata”), primarily through community funding via membership fees and donations. OpenCitations‘ members are listed on the website: https://opencitations.net/members-and-donors/

Revenue generated from services, not data

OpenCitations charges no fees for any of its services, access to its data, or reuse of its software. OpenCitations members, donors and third parties all have equal free access.

Volunteer labour

OpenCitations’ core operations are carried out by paid staff, ensuring that the continuity and reliability of its services do not depend on volunteer labour. Nevertheless, OpenCitations recognises the value of voluntary labour. Indeed, the document Rules of Membership and Organizational Structure specifies that membership of the International Advisory Board is honorary and without remuneration, and that the Hosting Entity will reimburse all reasonable expenses related to travel, accommodation, and meals incurred in attending meetings, within the limits of the budget allocated for such purposes. While this is already stated in the governance framework, it is important to reiterate and further formalise it within the Financial Policy document currently under development. More broadly, the OpenCitations Mission Statement emphasises the importance of community engagement (voluntary and non-remunerated) through, for example, the involvement of community actors in the direct provision and curation of OpenCitations data, as well as the broader role of the community in supporting funding and participating in governance.

Transition planning

Transition planning is only partially developed. While the governance structure is in place, ensuring a management handover through the possibility of changing the hosting member upon approval by the Trustee Network, there is a lack of detailed operational documentation for individual roles within the management and technical teams, which may limit the organisation’s ability to ensure immediate continuity in the event of key personnel changes.

Open source

All OpenCitations software is released under open source licences, ensuring full transparency, reusability, and the possibility for the community to inspect, modify, and replicate the infrastructure.

Open data

To ensure the greatest possible reusability, all OpenCitations data is published under a Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Waiver that permits downloading and re-use of any nature, including added-value re-purposing and commercial exploitation.

Available data

Data are provided through multiple access points, including REST APIs, SPARQL endpoints, query interfaces, and downloadable data dumps. This ensures broad accessibility and supports diverse use cases across the community.

Patent non-assertion

OpenCitations commits not to pursue patents, ensuring its infrastructure remains fully open and replicable.

Prioritise interoperability and open standards to ensure continuity and resilience

The infrastructure has been redesigned as a container-based solution, thereby facilitating replication, deployment across different environments, and long-term service continuity.

Renewal of the International Advisory Board for OpenCitations: welcome the new members!

The International Advisory Board for OpenCitations is one of the four organizational bodies which define OpenCitations’s governance structure (Director; Council; Advisory Board; Management Team). The Board is a committee of the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna, and is made up of Open Infrastrucutures and Open Science experts elected by the Council of OpenCitations among a plethora of candidates. The role of the International Advisory Board is to give strategic advice, and guide OpenCitations development by providing an outsider’s point of view on our activities.

The first structure of the Advisory Board was defined by the election, back in 2020, of eight members selected by the Council within the main scholarly stakeholder communities of relevance to OpenCitations (librarians, scientometricians, academics, publishers, funders, data service providers, etc.). These members have served OpenCitations for the last four years, and have accompanied and addressed some of the major changes in OpenCitations. Indeed, in the previous four years, OpenCitations has grown in team composition, community collaborations and data provision. In these years, our coverage approached that of the major databases, we have revolutionized our ingestion workflow to manage a growing number of data sources, and thanks to the involvement of some members of the Advisory Board in two internal working groups, we have been working on the stakeholder identification and governance evolution.

It was right in the Governance Evolution working group that, in the last year, the need to renovate the International Advisory Board composition has emerged, intending to make the renewal process recurring every three years after the pilot experience with the first International Advisory Board. As an initial action resulting from the Governance Evolution Working group, we held the elections of the members of the new International Board on OpenCitations in the first week of December. The voting council selected eight members among ten candidates who strongly committed to open scholarship.

We are now happy to announce the new members of the International Advisory Board, and while thanking them for their enthusiastic involvement in the Board, we also want to express our gratitude to the former Board members who have accompanied us in the last four years. The new International Advisory Board will also welcome one representative from OpenCitations’ Strategic Member (Scientific Interest Group of the French National Fund for Open Science) as a non-elected Board member.

The new members of the International Board for OpenCitations are:

Marcel R. Ackermann (Team Lead of dblp Computer Science Bibliography)

Maria Gould (Product Director at DataCite and Director of ROR)

Catriona MacCallum (Director of Open Science, Hindawi Open Access Publisher)

Philippe Mongeon (Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Information Science at University of Montreal)

Cameron Neylon (Professor of Research Communications, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University)

Iratxe Puebla (Director of Make Data Count)

Dominika Tkaczyk (Director of Data Science at CrossRef)

Didier Torny (on behalf of the French Open Science Committee)

Ludo Waltman (Professor of Quantitative Science Studies and Deputy Director, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University)

The International Advisory Board’s activities will start early in 2025, picking up the threads of the previous Board’s work. We look forward to working with relevant actors in the Open Science community.

Find OpenCitations on Infra Finder, a new tool to discover and support Open Infrastructures

If you are a leader of a Library or a Research Institution and would like to learn more about the existing open infrastructures that could help your institution to evolve in the research environment, but you don’t know where to look for, you can now use Infra Finder, a brand-new tool aimed at foster discovery, adoption, and investment for open infrastructure services. Infra Finder is launched by Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), and is designed to be the go-to resource for anyone navigating the complex landscape of infrastructure services and standards enabling open research and scholarship.

The tool stems from the feedback collected from the community after the launch, in 2022, of the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services pilot project in 2022, from which IOI decided to re-envision what outcomes they could affect and rethink what solutions could look like, also by furthering the Open Science principles conveyed by UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science, the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and other Open Science initiatives and guidelines.

We are happy to announce that OpenCitations is among the 56 infrastructures which have accepted IOI’s invitation to be included in this first release of Infra Finder. During its development, IOI team has been constantly collecting feedback from the infrastructures involved, and has conducted user testing to understand how different people might approach it. In OpenCitations we believe that Infra Finder could serve as an helpful tool to make OpenCitations and the other infrastructure services more visible to a wider and diverse community. Infra Finder allows users to easily find and compare the catalogued services, and its intuitive use could work as a starting point towards the creation of a greater awareness of existing open infrastructures, thus leading users to further explore their features and services and, hopefully, to consider the possibility of support their sustainability.

IOI is currently planning to include new services in Infra Finder: if you are part of an organization that would like to be included, you can apply by filling out their Expression of Interest form. IOI will give two identical webinars to share with the community more details about the background and features of Infra Finder and on how interested infrastructure services can express interest in being listed. Register here to the either slot:

May 2, 2024, 1600 UTC / 12pm Eastern

May 3, 2024, 1400 UTC / 10am Eastern (in your time zone)

The IOI blog post for the launch is available at https://investinopen.org/blog/infra-finder-your-hub-for-finding-infrastructure-services-enabling-open-research-and-scholarship

OpenCitations supports the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information for a fundamental transformation in the research information landscape

Research Information can be defined as an information (sometimes referred to as metadata) relating to the conduct and communication of research. This includes, but is not limited to, (1) bibliographic metadata such as titles, abstracts, references, author data, affiliation data, and data on publication venues, (2) metadata on research software, research data, samples, and instruments, (3) information on funding and grants, and (4) information on organizations and research contributors. Research information is located in systems such as bibliographic databases, software archives, data repositories, and current research information systems.

Decision-making in science is often biased by the typology of research information, and too often is based on closed research information, which is locked inside proprietary infrastructures and run by for-profit providers that impose severe restrictions on the use and reuse of the information. As a consequence, errors, gaps, and biases in closed research information are difficult to expose and even more difficult to fix. Indicators and analytics derived from this information lack transparency and reproducibility. Decisions about the careers of researchers, the future of research organizations, and ultimately the way science serves the whole of humanity, depend on these black-box indicators and analytics.

There is an urgency for a fundamental change in the research information landscape towards openness. Indeed, open research information enables science policy decisions to be made based on transparent evidence and inclusive data and information used in research evaluations to be accessible and auditable by those being assessed. It makes it possible for the global movement towards open science to be supported by information that is fully open and transparent.

Today, over 40 organizations, including the University of Bologna, are committing to making openness of research information the norm and to lead this change in the research information landscape. The signatories of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information commit to taking a lead in transforming the way research information is used and produced, to make the openness of information about the conduct and communication of research the new norm.

The full text of the Barcelona Declaration is now publicly shared on barcelona-declaration.org and presents the commitments that all the signatories of the Declaration adhere to, namely

To make openness the default for the research information we use and produce;
To work with services and systems that support and enable open research information;
To support the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information;
To support collective action to accelerate the transition to openness of research information.

In addition to the signatories, the Declaration has been supported by several organizations providing data, services and infrastructures. OpenCitations has declared its support to the Declaration, together with AmeliCA, Crossref, Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), DataCite, EuropePMC, DOAB, DOAJ, Europe PMC, Liberate Science GmbH, OAPEN, OpenAIRE, OurResearch, Redalyc and ROR. OpenCitations believes in the Declaration as a starting point for a substantial change by promoting values which OpenCitations fully supports, as stated in the words of our Director and Associate Professor at the University of Bologna Silvio Peroni:

Since its creation in 2010, OpenCitations has always advocated and actively worked to produce open research information and develop infrastructural technologies to maximise its sharing and reuse in different applicative contexts. Thus, we embrace the Declaration’s goals and commitments and look forward to working with all the signatories to foster the use and production of open research information.

Prof. Silvio Peroni has been a part of the initial team of over 25 research information experts, representing organizations that carry out, fund, and evaluate research, as well as organizations that provide research information infrastructures, which first prepared The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. The group met in Barcelona in November 2023 in a workshop hosted by SIRIS Foundation. The preparation of the Declaration was coordinated by Bianca Kramer (Sesame Open Science), Cameron Neylon (Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, Curtin University), and Ludo Waltman (Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University).

As of April 15, 2024, the list of signatories involves universities and other research performing organizations such as Αthena Research Center (Greece), Charles University (Czech Republic), Coimbra Group (international), Hamburg University of Technology (Germany), I-CERCA – Centres de Recerca de Catalunya (Spain), Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia – Ibict (Brazil), Leiden University (Netherlands), Museo Galileo. Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Italy), Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg (Germany), Sorbonne Université (France), Spanish National Research Council – CSIC (Spain), Udice – French Research Universities (France), UnilLaSalle (France), Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia), Università di Bologna (Italy), Universitat de Barcelona (Spain), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), Université Grenoble Alpes (France), Université Le Havre Normandie (France), Université Paris Saclay (France), University of Coimbra (Portugal), University of Groningen (Netherlands), University of Maribor (Slovenia), University of Milan (Italy), University of Poitiers (France), University of the Azores (Portugal), University of the Balearic Islands (Spain), University of Turku (Finland), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands); research funding organizations and governments, including Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (US), Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation – FCRI (Spain), Dutch Research Council NWO (Netherlands), French Open Science Committee (France), French National Research Agency – ANR (France), Fundació Internacional Josep Carreras (Spain), Région Normandie (France), Regione Toscana (Italy), ZonMw (Netherlands); other organizations: Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya – CSUC (Spain); EOSC Association (international), Latin American Council of Social Sciences – CLACSO (international), National Open Research Analytics, Technical University of Denmark (Denmark), State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine (Ukraine), TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library (Germany), UK Reproducibility Network – UKRN (UK).

There is a need for global and concrete action to reach the tipping point in the transition from closed to open research information, and the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information is open for signature by all organizations that carry out, fund, and evaluate research to support this transition.

If you want to learn more about the Barcelona Declaration, join us in the launch webinar on April 23, 1.00-2.30pm CEST. Click here to register for the webinar.

You can also keep yourself up to date by following the Barcelona Declaration’s social media channels:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/barcelona-declaration/

Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@BarcelonaDORI

X: https://x.com/BarcelonaDORI

OpenCitations is part of the CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment (OI4RRA)

Last March, the  Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) launched its call for members to propose Working Groups and National Chapters. The aim of the call (which was closed in June) was to foster the creation of Working Groups that would work as ‘communities of practice’ to enable systemic reform of research assessment by providing mutual learning and collaboration on specific thematic areas.

A group of 23 Coalition members, including University of Bologna’s personnel working at OpenCitations, collaborated in designing and proposing the CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment (OI4RRA), focusing on having open infrastructures for making research assessment more transparent and responsible, and thus enabling the research community to be in full control of the data and indicators it relies on in assessments.

We are now thrilled to announce that the proposed Working Group has been accepted, and will start its activities in the next months, with the mission to “enable institutions to move from proprietary infrastructure and research information, to open alternatives–in support of the transition to responsible research assessment practices. This effort will take into consideration the wide range of research outputs and open science practices and address the diversity of the global research community”.

The CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment will work to facilitate the use of existing open infrastructures, -, with the aim to make it possible a transition to a fully OI4RRA ecosystem – interconnected, decentralised and open – that is fit to serve existing and emerging needs of reformed RRA agendas.

For more information visit the dedicated section on CoARA’s website, and read the full list of participants in OI4RRA here.

OpenCitations is hiring: one-year Research Fellow position now open

OpenCitations is seeking applicants for a one-year Research Fellow position to be held from April 2023, for which the application closing deadline is 28 February 2023.

Currently, the amount and complexity of the data made available by OpenCitations opens up several issues related to the improvement, scalability and optimisation of its infrastructure. Therefore, it is crucial to study and customise recent approaches for managing Big Data to create a knowledge base to build decentralised, scalable, long-lasting and easily-customizable services.

The goal of the Research Fellowship is

to study the current limitations and possible improvements to introduce in the OpenCitations infrastructure
to reengineer the current infrastructure to make it more scalable, reliable, interoperable, reusable and distributed.

Thus, the Research Fellow is expected to address issues related to the provision of Web services, the management of distributed and heterogeneous databases and services, data conversion and ingestion processes, parallel computing and security. Particular attention will be given to data preservation and the long-term maintenance and update of the infrastructure.

Requirements

The minimal formal requirement for this position is a Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Science and Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering, Digital Humanities or equivalent.

Moreover, applicants are expected to have

sysadmin skills
computer programming skills
the ability to read, write and speak in good English

It is highly desirable for the applicants to have

demonstrable expertise in using and managing Linux servers (especially Debian and Raspbian), container orchestrator systems (e.g. Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code systems (e.g. Terraform), Web servers implementing FastGCI (especially lighttpd), graph databases (especially Blazegraph), Python programming and Python Web Application Frameworks (especially web.py and Flask), Git-based version-control systems (especially GitHub);
a strong and demonstrable commitment to open science
demonstrable knowledge of Semantic Web technologies, Linked Data and Web technologies

Teamwork abilities and a good knowledge of Italian would also be very beneficial.

How to apply

The Research Fellowship application (written either in Italian or in English) should minimally comprise the following:

a cover letter of application, motivating why the candidate is applying for this position;
a full Curriculum Vitae containing information about prior scientific and professional jobs and the scientific production of the candidate;
a public portfolio of software, projects and activities undertaken within the past ten years, with a clear indication of the applicant’s role in each.

The Call for Applications (in Italian and in English) is available online on the website of the University of Bologna. It also includes an attachment with a description of OpenCitations and of the activities related to the position. The position has a net salary (exempt from income tax, after deduction of social security contributions) in excess of 23K euros per year. As indicated in the Call for Applications, candidates need to apply exclusively through the University of Bologna web portal.

Two years of achievements within the ‘SCOSS family’ (and it’s not over yet!)

Posted on August 10th 2022 by Chiara Di Giambattista

← Previous post: The OpenCitations Roadmap is now publicly available on Trello

→ Next post: New documents that present OpenCitations’ mission, unique benefits, present status and future plans

In March, The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) celebrated, together with the generous funders and the projects involved (including OpenCitations), the achievement of an amazing milestone: a total of 4 million Euros raised so far for supporting the growth and development of Open Science Infrastructures. This significant sum is not just a number, but a concrete sign of the commitment of numerous institutions all over the world to ensure the success of vital organs of the Open Science ecosystem. Thanks to the pledges recently made, the new infrastructures selected for the third SCOSS pledging round have now started developing their services and can now look to the future with more surety.

At the end of 2019, OpenCitations was selected by SCOSS for its second pledging round, and since then much progress has been made. As the OpenCitations’ founder and director David Shotton recently stated:

“OpenCitations is growing, thanks to the generous support from our members and donors, and we thank SCOSS sincerely for bringing us into contact with them. The citation coverage provided by OpenCitations is now approaching parity with that of the leading commercial citation indexes, and our ambition, within the next five years, is for OpenCitations to be routinely used by our worldwide stakeholders as their primary source of comprehensive scholarly citation information”.

In 2020, OpenCitations monitored the achievements of the first year of SCOSS support and shared the most important updates in a blog post. After a review from SCOSS Advisory Group and the SCOSS Board, the OpenCitations 2021 report to SCOSS is now available in the SCOSS May newsletter. We’re proud of the successful developments that 2021 brought with it in many areas, from the technical enhancements to OpenCitations to its new supporters and partnerships.

After a two-year-long collaboration, we in OpenCitations recognise that one of the most precious benefits of being part of SCOSS is working within a community: SCOSS not only provides a framework but also a real family of supportive institutions that support the Infrastructures during their growth and provide a safety net if troubles occur along the path. The bi-monthly meetings organized by the SCOSS team enable dialogue with the other infrastructures within the same pledging round, while presentation and promotion to the institutions worldwide are fostered by participation in webinars and conferences. During 2021, OpenCitations participated in 16 events, and in 5 of them (LIBER Webinar 2021, JISC Webinar 2021, LIBER Annual Conference 2021, Open Science Fair 2021, and Open Access Tage 2021) OpenCitations’ director Silvio Peroni gave talks together with the representatives of others infrastructures involved in the SCOSS second pledging round.

In compliance with the POSI principles, SCOSS encouraged OpenCitations to set up an open governance structure. As described here, the organizational bodies included in the OpenCitations present governance are three: the Directors, the International Advisory Board, and the Council. Although executive power is still currently vested in the hands of the Directors, in the last two years the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, a committee that now comprises nine Open Science experts from different professional and academic backgrounds, has had a crucial role in guiding the OpenCitations activities, and it is now working on strategic developments in terms of collaborations, policies, support and governance. Moreover, last December OpenCitations organized a Webinar in conjunction with its Annual Meeting to present and discuss with the OpenCitations Council members OpenCitations’ recent developments and future plans.

OpenCitations is highly reliant upon the connections we have created and on people working together: thanks to the support we received throughout the last two years, the OpenCitations team has grown and now includes six people employed by the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna, the administrative body for OpenCitations. Besides the previously announced appointments of Claudio Fabbri (Research Manager), Chiara Di Giambattista (Communications Director and Community Development Manager), Giuseppe Grieco (Software and Systems Developer), and Arcangelo Massari (Software Developer, working within the OpenAIRE-Nexus project), early in 2022 Ivan Heibi, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bologna, joined OpenCitations with responsibility for the technical infrastructure, and Arianna Moretti, who recently graduated in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge, joined as a software developer. This enlarged team, involving young and motivated researchers, is working on numerous projects to be announced later in 2022. You can learn more about OpenCitations’ ongoing activities on our public roadmap.

OpenCitations’ aim continues to be the publication of open data describing the bibliographic citations linking global scholarly publications, with depth and scope, while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy and provenance. Most importantly, OpenCitations services will always be free, making global scholarly citation data available at zero cost and without restriction for third party analysis and re-use.

With its support, SCOSS has been helping OpenCitations to pursue its mission and spread the benefits of Open Science. However, 2022 will be the last year of the three-year-long support ensured by SCOSS. OpenCitations activities won’t stop in 2023 — indeed there still are many long-planned activities that we hope to initiate in the near future, given sufficient resources. This is why OpenCitations requires ongoing support from the scholarly community. All the information you may require to start helping us financially is available on the OpenCitations website: https://opencitations.net/membership

By supporting OpenCitations, you will embrace and sustain the ideals and vision of Open Science, and you will help in creating a more open, democratic and fair knowledge environment.

OpenCitations and EC funding: OpenAIRE Nexus and RISIS2

The incentives for new OpenCitations innovative solutions

Two years ago, in their canonical 2020 QSS paper on OpenCitations, Silvio Peroni and David Shotton anticipated the creation of the new database, OpenCitations Meta, able to “offer a faster and richer service” by storing bibliographic metadata “in house”. Meta would “avoid duplication of data by efficiently permitting us to keep […] a single copy of the metadata for each of the bibliographic entities involved as citing or cited entities in the different OpenCitations’ citation indexes”, would remove the requirement for potentially slow API calls to external metadata sources such as Crossref and ORCID, and would enable us to index citations involving entities lacking DOIs.

Important synergies to achieve goals

Today, thanks to the recent involvement of OpenCitations in two EC-funded projects, the OpenAIRE-Nexus Project (Horizon 2020 EU funded project, GA: 101017452) and the RISIS2 Project (Horizon 2020 EU funded project, GA: 824091), the development of OpenCitations Meta has commenced, with a planned release date later in 2022.

The OpenAIRE-Nexus project started in January 2021 to embrace and expand the operation of a portfolio of thirteen services, provided by OpenAIRE infrastructure, public institutions, organisations and universities, classified into three portfolios entitled PUBLISH, MONITOR, and DISCOVER. The OpenAIRE-Nexus portfolios focus on the demands of the three main categories of the research lifecycle. Therefore, OpenAIRE-Nexus makes sure such services are integrated to provide a uniform Open Science Scholarly Communication package for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Within the OpenAIRE Nexus project there is scope for producing not only support materials (factsheet, guides, video tutorials, demos) but also training sessions where the services in the three portfolios will be showcased, anticipating the EOSC onboarding process. The role of OpenCitations in the project is to provide open bibliographic citations, and interconnect and integrate (and vice versa) functionalities with the OpenAIRE Research Graph and more OpenAIRE-Nexus services such as EpiSciences, OpenAIRE MONITOR) the core component of OpenAIRE infrastructure and services and of the EOSC Resource Catalogue.

Additionally, we are happy to announce our recent involvement in the RISIS2 Project. The Research Infrastructure for Science and Innovation Policy Studies (RISIS) is a project funded by the European Union under a Horizon2020 Research and Innovation Programme. RISIS2 involves 18 partners working together to create and maintain a research infrastructure for the field of Science, Technology, and Industry (STI) Studies, and to build an advanced research community in this field. OpenCitations’ contributions to RISIS2 will include not only the creation of OpenCitations Meta but also the development of a new citation index of open references, the OpenCitations Index of DataCite Open Citations (DOCI), which will be based on the open reference holdings of DataCite and, together with COCI, will be cross-searchable through our unified OpenCitations API.

Lessons learnt so far

A year into the OpenAIRE-Nexus project, we have found that one of the most significant benefits for OpenCitations is our involvement with this wide cooperative network of European research infrastructures, services, and communities, within which we can exchange experiences, ideas, and knowledge, and discuss any challenges and outcomes with our colleagues. More importantly, OpenCitations becomes positioned within the Open Science ecosystem, as a valuable innovative infrastructure with strong proof of integration and interoperable operations. Being part of the OpenAIRE-Nexus team has opened up more future challenges and expectations, and raised the bar for the inclusion of more functionalities of value. Thanks to the dedication of its efficient communication team, OpenAIRE is also helping us by communicating OpenCitations services to additional users and stakeholders, by inclusion within the comprehensive OpenAIRE services catalogue, by releasing an OpenCitations factsheet and by permitting us to present the latest information on OpenCitations through established events (i.e. Open Science FAIR 2022). FAIR and openness of information is our motto, and we strongly promote this through all our activities.

Expanding our team

As announced in our previous blog post “Five reasons why 2021 has been a great year for OpenCitations”, the support we receive from the EU as part of OpenAIRE-Nexus has enabled our recent appointment of Arcangelo Massari, a software developer who is now playing a crucial role in the creation and development of OpenCitations Meta.

As the year 2022 progresses, we look forward to bringing you further information about other new goals for OpenCitations, made possible by the support we receive from our numerous partnerships.

California Digital Library invests in OpenCitations

OpenCitations is excited to announce that the California Digital Library (CDL) has joined our growing list of contributors.

CDL’s commitment to sustainable open scholarship has great value for the global scholarly community. Through its investments and partnerships, CDL aims to create an international academic and librarian dialogue, trusting in the idea that “the university, its scholars and its libraries thrive when we transcend organizational boundaries and commit ourselves to shared investments”.

CDL’s contribution will generously support OpenCitations throughout 2021-2023. CDL funding in the fiscal year 2020-2021 also includes two other SCOSS-endorsed infrastructures, OAPEN and DOAB, the non-profit organization Open Access Switchboard, and the services PsyArXiv and SCOAP3 Books. As can be read in the recent post by Ellen Finnie, this investment reflects CDL’s “commitment to ’invest in open’ by allocating a portion of our collections funding to the development of open content and infrastructure in support of UC scholarship and teaching”.

OpenCitations team is grateful to be included in CDL’s ongoing investment in open infrastructure. Thank you!

OpenCitations’ compliance with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure

What should an open scholarly infrastructure look like?

An answer to this tough question can be found in the original February 2015 blog post by Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin and Cameron Neylon

Bilder G., Lin J., Neylon C. (2015) Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure , http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859

and in the summary of the principles to be found as:

Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2020), The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.24343/C34W2H :

“Infrastructure at its best is invisible. We tend to only notice it when it fails. If successful, it is stable and sustainable. Above all, it is trusted and relied on by the broad community it serves. Trust must run strongly across each of the following areas: running the infrastructure (governance), funding it (sustainability), and preserving community ownership of it (insurance)”.

These areas are fully define the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), which provide a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organizations and initiatives that support the research community can be run and sustained.

As far as we are aware, Crossref was the first infrastructure to publish its compliance with POSI, detailed in Geoffrey Bilder’s December 2020 blog post

Crossref’s Board votes to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure.

OpenCitations too espouses POSI and, in January 2021, we monitored the extent of our own compliance with POSI, the results of which are shown in the following diagram.

Governance

●	Coverage across the research enterprise	We gather citations from global scholarship
●	Stakeholder governed	Advisory board currently lacks executive power and is not elected
●	Non-discriminatory membership	Membership open to all those espousing open science
●	Transparent operations	Everything is open
●	Cannot lobby	OpenCitations lobbies to achieve open scholarly citations and bibliographic metadata; it does not engage in political or financial lobbying
●	Living will	Since all our data open, others can recreate our service
●	Formal incentives to fulfill mission & wind-down	No formal plan for wind-down has yet been drawn up

Sustainability

●	Time-limited funds used only for time-limited activities	Grant income should be used solely for grantprojects
●	Goal to generate surplus	Goal not yet realized – income so far too limited
●	Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months	Goal not yet realized – income so far too limited
●	Mission-consistent revenue generation	Membership fees and solicited donations
●	Revenue based on services, not data	All data and services freely given to community, and thus do not generate income

Insurance

●	Open source	All software under open source licenses
●	Open data	All data available under CC0 waiver
●	Available data	All data available via REST APIs, SPARQL endpoints, query interfaces and data dumps
●	Patent non-assertion	We will not patent anything: OpenCitations’ infrastructure is free to replicate

We at OpenCitations are proud of the results reached in the Insurance area, but realise that we still have some was to go in the other areas. Although the general situation is already satisfying, we are working to strengthen our weak points.