OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship

Authors : Silvio Peroni, David Shotton

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 data sets, 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 resource description framework (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 624 million bibliographic citations and is receiving considerable usage by the scholarly community.

URL : OpenCitations, an infrastructure organization for open scholarship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00023

COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations

Authors : Ivan Heibi, Silvio Peroni, David Shotton

In this paper, we present COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations (this http URL). COCI is the first open citation index created by OpenCitations, in which we have applied the concept of citations as first-class data entities, and it contains more than 445 million DOI-to-DOI citation links derived from the data available in Crossref.

These citations are described in RDF by means of the newly extended version of the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM).

We introduce the workflow we have developed for creating these data, and also show the additional services that facilitate the access to and querying of these data via different access points: a SPARQL endpoint, a REST API, bulk downloads, Web interfaces, and direct access to the citations via HTTP content negotiation.

Finally, we present statistics regarding the use of COCI citation data, and we introduce several projects that have already started to use COCI data for different purposes.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.06052