The blog of the OpenCitations Infrastructure

Several things and events happened during the past month and a half which involved us directly as a participant. Here we introduce some of the most significant ones: a) our interview during a Fireside Chat at the Open Publishing Fest; b) the SCOSS presentation of a poster about us during LIBER 2020; c) the two new short-term open positions (application deadline: 23 July 2020) for our Wellcome Trust funded project;

Silvio Peroni

Several important recent events have involved OpenCitations directly as a participant. Here we introduce some of the most significant ones: Our interviews during a

 Fireside Chat

with John Chodacki during the Open Publishing Fest; The SCOSS poster about OpenCitations and the other two selected infrastructures during

 LIBER 2020

, which won the LIBER 2020 Peoples Choice Poster Award;

OpenCitations updates: interviews, outreach, research positions, citations

Today, we have published the bi-monthly release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations.

More than 733M citations now available in COCI

University of Oxford

David M. Shotton

Evidence submitted by David Shotton in response to the Royal Society’s Policy Study “Science as a Public Enterprise” Call for Evidence, addressing the following two topics raised by that call:

 Getting Researcher buy-in.

How do we get researchers to be more willing to share data? What is there to be learned from disciplines such as genomics which have norms which favour wide sharing of data?

Why researchers don’t publish data

OpenCitations Team

The Open Citations Project is global in scope, designed to change the face of scientific publishing. It aims to make bibliographic citation links as easy to use as Web links. Its goals are three-fold: To establish OpenCitations.net, a public RDF triplestore for biomedical literature citations.

JISC Open Citations: Aims, Objectives and Final Outputs

BIBO v1.3, the Bibliographic Ontology developed by Bruce D’Arcus and Frédérick Giasson [1], was the first OWL ontology dedicated to describing bibliographic entities, and has attracted a wide group of users. It provided the much-needed ability to describe the nature of cited works in RDF to a high degree of granularity, in terms of Title, Abstract, Journal, Volume, Pages, ISSN, DOI, dataCopyrighted, editor, etc.

Comparison of BIBO and FaBiO

Chiara Di Giambattista

Blog post by Ivan Heibi (University of Bologna), Arianna Moretti (University of Bologna) and Chiara Di Giambattista (University of Bologna).

In the past five years, the OpenCitations data has been enriched with numerous new indexes of open citation data from different sources.

A new revolutionary workflow for a unified collection of citations: say hello to the OpenCitations Index

Since its inauguration in 2010, OpenCitations has always granted free access to its services to users throughout the world, with no requirement for registration or sign-up. Programmatic access to OpenCitations data can be obtained either via our SPARQL endpoints and our REST APIs.

OpenCitations Access Tokens: how they work and why they are important

OpenCitations is managed by the newly formed Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna. The new International Advisory Board for OpenCitations is formally part of the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata. The Board has been created to assist the Directors of OpenCitations by providing stakeholder community input that will guide the future activities and direction of OpenCitations.

As mentioned in an earlier blog post, OpenCitations has been selected by SCOSS for its second round of crowd-funding support from stakeholders within the open scholarship community.

Announcing the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata and the International Advisory Board for OpenCitations

The memorable date 20/02/2020 saw the publication by MIT Press of the first issue of Volume One of a new journal,

 Quantitative Science Studies

(QSS), the official open access journal of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). QSS’s Editor in Chief is Ludo Waltman (CWTS, University of Leiden, Netherlands), Vincent Larivière (Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada) and Staša Milojević

The first issue of Quantitative Science Studies

As part of the Open Citations Project, Alex Dutton recently completed a graphing plug-in for the Open Citations web site, that permits users to generate different kinds of graphs of citation networks by querying the Open Citation Corpus for a particular article, and either display the network of papers citing that article (input citations), papers cited by that article (output citations), or both.

Like a kid with a new train set!  Exploring citation networks

Last September, I attended the Fifth Annual Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, held in Riga, at which I had been invited to give a paper entitled

 The


 Open Citations Corpus – freeing scholarly citation data

.  A recording of my talk is available here, and my PowerPoint presentation is separately available here.

Three publications describing the Open Citations Corpus

Is Data Publication the Right Metaphor?

is an essay by Mark Parsons and Peter Fox to be published in the Data Science Journal, for which a preprint has been provided for open pre-publication community peer review at http://mp-datamatters.blogspot.com/2011/12/seeking-open-review-of-provocative-data.html.

Comments on IS DATA PUBLICATION THE RIGHT METAPHOR?

Bibliographic references are the links that knit together independent scholarly endeavours.

Nature to open its reference list data

Data copied from JISC Expo DOAP (Description of a Project) spreadsheet at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ArsNASxXZiL6dC1mWWFMMjRWSmVha0E1WmdlQ05KcEE&amp;hl=en#gid=7.

 Project title

: The Open Citations Project

 Project tag

: jiscopencite

 Short project description

We will publish reference lists from Open Access biomedical journal articles as Linked Open Citation Data at

JISC Administrative Data for Open Citations Project

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.

Please help with OpenCitations’ entry in Wikipedia

Very VERY occasionally I read a paper that is so well written, and which addressed the points so accurately and so eloquently, that I rejoice.  The paper by Pettifer

 et al

. entitled

 Ceci n’est pas un hamburger: modelling and representing the scholarly article

that appeared in

 Learned Publishing

last October [1], is one of this special handful.

Comments on the paper Ceci n’est pas un hamburger

As previously described, the PubMed Central Open Access subset of journal articles yielded 6,529,815 independent bibliographic records of both citing and cited entities, while our use of the PubMed Entrez API provided a further 2,304,143 bibliographic records for the same cited entities. Before converting these references into RDF to create the Open Citations Corpust, we attempted to remove errors in the data.

Citation correction methods

We want to express our gratitude to the 18 institutional members and customers of the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries which have now pledged 89,250 euros to support OpenCitations over the next three years. This generous donation is part of a total funding of

Swiss Institutions pledge 89,250 Euros to OpenCitations

2021 is just behind us. Since January is “the Monday of the months”, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote[1], it’s a good time to take stock of what happened at OpenCitations during the past year.

Five reasons why 2021 has been a great year for OpenCitations

Among the external services used, the

 ORCID Public API

is of crucial importance for the task of author disambiguation. During the OCC ingestion workflow, the main metadata of an article are usually retrieved from the Crossref API.

Using the ORCID Public API for author disambiguation in the OpenCitations Corpus

Scholix Metadata Schema For Exchange Of Scholarly Communication Links

Types, open citations, closed citations, publishers, and participation reports of Crossref entities

COCI CSV dataset of all the citation data

Open Citation: Definition

Initiative aims to break science’s citation paywall

Publishing: Open citations

Software survey: VOSviewer, a computer program for bibliometric mapping

Crowdsourcing open citations with CROCI An analysis of the current status of open citations, and a proposal **Author(s) **Ivan Heibi – ivan.heibi2@unibo.it

 Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre (DHARC), Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

Silvio Peroni – silvio.peroni@unibo.it

 Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre (DHARC), Department of Classical Philology and

Crowdsourcing open citations with CROCI

In a previous series of blog posts we proposed the treatment of bibliographic citations as first-class data entities, permitting citations to be endowed with descriptive properties.

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

OpenCitations is very pleased to announce its collaboration with four new scholarly Research and Development projects that are early adopters of the recently updated OpenCitations Data Model, described in this blog post.

Early adopters of the OpenCitations Data Model

Requirements for citations to be treated as First-Class Data Entities   In my introductory blog post, I listed five requirements for the treatment of citations as first-class data entities.  The first of these requirements is that they must be definable in a machine-readable manner as a member of the class “Citation”, and describable using appropriate ontology terms.

Citations as First-Class Data Entities: Citation Descriptions

What is Related Work? Related Work is a user-friendly Web application developed to provide a means of browsing citation links, as the basis for a planned recommendation service for the best articles to read.

What is Related Work?
 


 Related Work

is a user-friendly Web application developed to provide a means of browsing citation links, as the basis for a planned recommendation service for the best articles to read.

Open Citations and Related Work projects merge

I recently posted a brief description of  an article entitled The Five Stars of Journal Articles, pointing to a preprint of this article in

 Nature Preceedings

.

Five Stars article published in D-Lib Magazine

One of the biggest challenges faced by modern scientists is information overload. The life sciences are probably the area most affected by it, with almost a million new entries being added to PubMed each year.

JISC Open Citations: Wider Benefits to Sector &amp; Achievements for Host Institution

The International Advisory Board for OpenCitations is one of the four organizational bodies which define OpenCitations’s governance structure (Director; Council; Advisory Board;

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

The Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus funded by the Wellcome Trust The Wellcome Trust, which funds research in big health challenges and campaigns for better science, has agreed to fund

 The Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus

, a new project to enhance the OpenCitations Corpus, as part of the Open Research Fund programme.

The Wellcome Trust funds OpenCitations

Silvio Peroni has recently created LODE (Live OWL Documentation Environment;

Using LODE for ontology visualization

[The text of this post was updated on 27-09-2013 and 04-04-2017 to reflect a new CrossRef metadata best practice document and a change in their URI.] Today I wrote an open letter to all scholarly journal publishers, available online here, entitled:

 Open your article reference lists for inclusion in the Open Citations Corpus.

In this letter, I request that publishers open the bibliographic citation data in their journal

Open letter to publishers

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.

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

OpenCitations has happily joined the open-source social media platform joinmastodon.org.

Follow OpenCitations on Mastodon

We now seek applicants for a new three-year research fellowship to be held from March 2021, for which the application closing deadline is 7 February 2021. Plan: to strengthen the current technical and computational infrastructure.

A year ago, at the end of 2019, OpenCitations was selected by the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS, https://scoss.org) for its second round of crowdfunding support, since SCOSS believes that OpenCitations aligns well with Open Science goals and is an innovative service.

Seeking applicants for three-year research fellowship position

The JISC, in response to its invitation to tender, has recently funded Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Ltd, a research and strategy consultancy, to undertake an independent study entitled

 Access to Citation Data: A Cost-Benefit and Risk Review and Forward Look

.  Evidence gathering for the study has just started, and the consultants are due to produce a report on this subject by next February.

Access to Citation Data

Reis

 et al

. (2008) [1] cites an earlier paper from Albert Ko’s research group, Ko

 et al

. (1999) [2]. In conventional parlance, as the following diagram shows, the word “reference” can mean either what is found in the text, what is found in the reference list, the act of citation, or the object of the citation itself, as in the sentence “All the references you will need to prepare for the journal club are on Kevin’s desk”.

Nomenclature for citations and references

The Open Citations Project has aimed to liberate bibliographic references from biomedical research literature as Open Linked Data, using as its starting corpus the Open Access Subset (OASS) of articles within PubMed Central. The greatest problem faced during this project, naively unanticipated before we started, was the extend of incompleteness, noise and errors of various sorts within the reference information extracted from the OASS articles.

Garbage in, garbage out – problems with bibliographic references

FRBR, the

 Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records

[1] is a general model, proposed by the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA), for describing bibliographic documents. It works for both physical and digital resources and has proved to be very flexible and powerful. One of the most important aspect of FRBR is the fact that it is not associated with a particular metadata schema or implementation.

Extending FRBR within FaBiO

Egon Willighagen, at Uppsala University, has pioneered the use of object properties from CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology, to characterize bibliographic citations in CiteULike, the free service for managing and discovering scholarly references.  Indeed, it was his use case that persuaded me of the need to generalize CiTO to include indirect citations.

Use of CiTO in CiteULike

A ‘like’ button is a well-known feature in communication software such as social networking services, Internet forums, news websites and blogs that permits a user to indicate that he/she likes, enjoys or supports certain content.

‘Likes’ joins the semantic web: cito:likes

David writes: Dr Heinrich Hartman is a new colleague of mine, who, having been working in the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, has just returned to Germany to start a new job in a leading semantic web research group, that of Steffan Staab at the Institute for Web Science and Technologies, University of Koblenz-Landau.

Why openness benefits research

To accompany today’s publication in D-Lib Magazine of the article The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles – a framework for article evaluation highlighted in the previous post, I have today also published The Five Stars Ontology, a simple ontology written in OWL 2 DL that forms part of SPAR, a suite of Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies.

Five Stars Ontology

CiTO v2.0 contains just two main object properties,

 cito:cites

and its inverse

 cito:isCitedBy

, each of which as thirty-two sub-properties. Intentionally, these properties are not constrained as to domain or range, thereby maximising their applicability in a wide range of citation contexts.

Functional clustering of CiTO properties

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 Dutch Research Council sustains OpenCitations

Last March, the  Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) launched its call for members to propose Working Groups and National Chapters.

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

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.

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

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

This post was first published on QUERTY: musings from the rabbit hole, a blog by Silvio Peroni In the scholarly ecosystem, a bibliographic citation is a conceptual directional link from a citing entity to a cited entity, used to acknowledge or ascribe credit for the contribution made by the author(s) of the cited entity.

*This post was first published on *

 QUERTY: musings from the rabbit


 hole

,

 a blog by Silvio Peroni

In the scholarly ecosystem, a bibliographic citation is a

 conceptual

directional link from a citing entity to a cited entity, used to acknowledge or ascribe credit for the contribution made by the author(s) of the cited entity.

Transparency meets open citations

“*What role does ‘open’ play in making this project special?”*  This apparently easy, but not banal, question was asked in the Open Publishing Awards nomination form, and at OpenCitations we prefaced our answer to it by stating “For OpenCitations, ‘open’ is the crucial value and the final purpose.” We consider the free availability of bibliographic citation data to be a necessary condition for the establishment of an open knowledge graph, and

OpenCitations receives the Open Publishing Award in Open Data

Research Information

can be defined as an information (sometimes referred to as metadata) relating to the conduct and communication of research.

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

The meaning of the word “dataset” is ambiguous, changing with context.

The meaning of the word “

 dataset

” is ambiguous, changing with context.

Nomenclature for data publications and citations

No-one is quite sure of the total number of scholarly publications within the global corpus. Indeed that number will be strongly influenced by the degree to which, in addition to books and journal articles, one includes within the definition of scholarly publications ‘grey literature’ such as reports published by official bodies, patents, etc.

Academia’s missing references

The interconnection between Wikipedia and Wikidata is now larger than ever.   The Wikipedia Citations dataset currently includes around 30M citations from Wikipedia pages to a variety of sources – of which 4M are to scientific publication.

Wikipedia Citations in Wikidata

The initial vision

Now that OpenCitations is hosting over one billion freely available scholarly bibliographic citations, this is perhaps an opportune moment to look back to the start of this initiative.

From little acorns . . . A retrospective on OpenCitations

We congratulate and thank Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, for endorsing the DORA Declaration on Research Assessment (https://sfdora.org/), thereby joining the hundreds of other publishers and scientific organizations which have endorsed DORA over the previous eight years, and also for making a commitment to open the references from all its journal articles submitted to Crossref.

Elsevier endorses DORA and opens its journal article reference lists

Last night I watched the Netflix documentary

 The Social Dilemma

(https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224), in which former employees of the big Silicon Valley social media companies expose the serious and sometimes tragic or even fatal consequences that social media may have on individual lives. These social media services are run by commercial companies under pressure from shareholders to make ever increasing profits.

The Social Dilemma and open academic analytics

Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures-v1

OpenCitations is an infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data.

OpenCitations described

Conference Linked Data: The ScholarlyData Project

OpenAIRE LOD Services: Scholarly Communication Data as Linked Data

One Year of the OpenCitations Corpus

Biotea: semantics for Pubmed Central

The Semantic Lancet Project: A Linked Open Dataset for Scholarly Publishing

FaBiO and CiTO: Ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations

The YASGUI family of SPARQL clients1

OSCAR: A Customisable Tool for Free-Text Search over SPARQL Endpoints

Introducing Wikidata to the Linked Data Web

Zotero: A bibliographic assistant to researcher

Usage stats of COCI in OpenCitations

Tearing Down Science's Citation Paywall, One Link At A Time

The SPAR Ontologies

The OpenCitations Data Model

Open Citation Identifier: Definition

None

The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship

Modelling OWL Ontologies with Graffoo

COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations **Author(s) **Ivan Heibi – ivan.heibi2@unibo.it

 Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre (DHARC), Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

Silvio Peroni – silvio.peroni@unibo.it

 Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre (DHARC), Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna,

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

In-Text Reference Pointer Identifier: Definition

Rationale   Readers of this blog will be familiar with Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs), described in an earlier post and formally defined in [1]. OCIs enable bibliographic citations, treated as first class information entities, to be uniquely identified and referenced, and are used to identify the &gt;624 million individual citations indexed in the latest release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, as

Introducing InTRePIDs – In-Text Reference Pointer Identifiers

We are now proud to announce the third release of COCI, which contains more than 624 million DOI-to-DOI citation links coming from both ‘the ‘Open’ and the ‘Limited’ sets of Crossref reference data.

COCI is the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, all released as CC0 material, and is described in the article Heibi I, Peroni S, Shotton D (2019). Software review: COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations.

 Scientometrics

121(2): 1213-1228.

More than 624 million citations now available on COCI

Setting our bibliographic references free: towards open citation data

Building Citation Networks with SPACIN

Funders should mandate open citations

The OpenCitations Enhancement Project Final report for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

 Report period: 1st May 2017 – 30 November 2018.

The OpenCitations Enhancement Project – final report

Shotton CitationIDs PIDapalooza 24-01-18 REVISED.pptx

Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation

Requirements for citations to be treated as First-Class Data Entities   In my introductory blog post, I listed five requirements for the treatment of citations as first-class data entities.  The fourth of these requirements is that they must be identifiable using a global persistent identifier scheme.

Citations as First-Class Data Entities: Open Citation Identifiers

Citations are now centre stage   As a result of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), launched on April 6 last year, almost all the major scholarly publishers now open the reference lists they submit to Crossref, resulting in more than half a billion references being openly available via the Crossref API.

Citations as First-Class Data Entities: Introduction

Good news!  Today, on January 16th 2018, Oxford University Press (OUP) announced its participation in the Initiative for Open Citations, and requested Crossref to turn on reference sharing for all OUP deposited references from more than half a million publications.  Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world, publishing in 70 languages and 190 countries.

Oxford University Press opens its references!

The OpenCitations Enhancement Project funded by Sloan The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funds research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economics, including a number of key technology projects relating to scholarly communication, has agreed to fund

 The OpenCitations Enhancement Project

, a new project to develop and enhance the OpenCitations Corpus.

The Sloan Foundation funds OpenCitations

Some folk are confused, but OpenCitations and the Initiative for Open Citations, despite the similarity of their names, are two distinct organizations.

OpenCitations and the Initiative for Open Citations: A Clarification

Since 1st January 2018, Crossref has had a new reference distribution policy, described at https://www.crossref.org/reference-distribution/.  There are three possible options for setting the reference distribution preference from which a publisher can choose, these being ‘Closed’, ‘Limited’ and ’Open“.  If the ‘Closed’ option is chosen, the references will only be used for the Crossref Cited-by service, and are not distributed via any of the

The new Crossref reference distribution policy

In October 2015, I asked Silvio Peroni, my long-term colleague in the development of the SPAR Ontologies, to become Co-Director of the Open Citations Project, and to work with me in taking forward the prototype Open Citations Corpus (OCC), originally developed at the University of Oxford with the support of Jisc, with the aim of developing it into a production service of real use to scholars.

Open Citations is dead.  Long live OpenCitations.

Ongoing work on the Open Citations extensions project is now reaching the point of visualising – at very much a prototype level at this stage – the outputs of our earlier efforts to import and index the PubMed Central Open Access subset and arXiv. Earlier in this project I asked David to specify a list of questions that he thought researchers might hope to answer by querying our Open Citations Corpus;

Open Citations – Doing some graph visualisations

JATS, the Journal Article Tag Suite, defines a vocabulary of XML elements and attributes used to describe the content and metadata of journal articles.  As described in the previous post, we have mapped the metadata elements of the JATS Journal Publishing Tag Set to RDF, so that publishers’ XML article metadata encoded using JATS might become part of the web of linked data.

An entry form for JATS metadata

I am delighted to announce that Cathy Kennedy*,* OUP’s Senior Publisher for Journals, has just written to me as follows:  “Oxford University Press is delighted to support the Open Citation Corpus initiative in the interest of furthering and disseminating scholarship.

Oxford University Press to support Open Citations

In a previous blog post, I described the work that Silvio Peroni and I undertook in May 2011 to map the main terms from the DataCite Metadata Kernel v2.0 to RDF.  To enable that, we created a ‘proto-ontology’, the DataCite Ontology version 0.2, that contained just the following four object properties:  *

Revising the DataCite Ontology

We are happy to announce OpenCitations’ participation in a number of

 online conferences and events

during the next few weeks. Our directors Silvio Peroni and David Shotton will be speaking at the Open Science Fair 2021, the OASPA Conference 2021 and Open Access Tage.

Save the&nbsp;dates:&nbsp;OpenCitations’&nbsp;September&nbsp;events

Why should the publishers of subscription-access journals, who presently generate income from the sale of access to peer-reviewed full text scholarly articles, be willingly open the reference lists of these articles, and contribute these to the Open Citations Corpus for publication as open linked data? I would like to suggest the following reasons:  1. There is a general move towards open data, which is widely regarded as a common good.

Why publishers should open their references

Many people will be familiar with Tim Berners-Lee’s five stars of linked data, categorising the publication of data on the web in levels of increasing usefulness.

The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles

To illustrate three kinds of problems in obtaining correct author lists for Open Citation data from articles in the PubMed Central Open Access subset (OASS), I take three examples, the first of which is the result of a publication policy, the second due to mis-handling of an authorship attribution at the time of publication, and the third exemplifing errors introduced when handling non-English personal names.

Who wrote this paper?  Author list problems in PubMed Central references

In biology, the fields of macromolecular structural biology and sequence bioinformatics have, since the 1970s, had established international databases for the deposition of data, and journal policies mandating such deposition prior to acceptance for publication of manuscripts describing the data.  Similar good practices have developed more recently in other disciplines, notably astronomy.

The plate tectonics of research data publication

The JISC Open Citations Project website at http://opencitations.net exists for several purposes: To hold introductory information about the JISC Open Citations Project. To hold contact information for the project team.

JISC Open Citations Project web site

**Executive summary **  *Introduction *  To general readers of this blog, this post will appear different from normal posts. Rather than being about a particular topic, it pulls together a summary of the work undertaken over the past year within the Open Citations Project supported by the JISC, and is primarily intended to assist JISC evaluation of the project and its outputs.

OpenCitations blog