Introduction
Welcome to the official brand guidelines for OpenCitations. This page serves as a comprehensive guide for partner projects to maintain consistency and integrity in the presentation of our brand across all communication channels.
Brand Identity
Vision Statement
OpenCitations provides an enduring open and fit-for-purpose source of comprehensive high-quality scholarly bibliographic and citation metadata. By enabling integration with complementary sources of open scholarly information, OpenCitations provides the basis for the collaborative development of an integrated global network of open knowledge services that meet the practical requirements of scholarly institutions and their members, in terms both of fundamental community-curated scholarly information and of interpretive academic analytical metrics, thereby facilitating free access to such crucially important information and indicators for scholars, academic administrators, research funders and other interested parties across the globe.
Mission Statement
As a key infrastructure component for global Open Science, the mission of OpenCitations is to harvest and openly publish accurate and comprehensive metadata describing the world’s academic publications and the scholarly citations that link them, and to preserve ongoing access to this information by secure archiving. We provide this information, both in human-readable form and in interoperable machine-readable Linked Open Data formats, under open licenses at zero cost and without restriction for third-party analysis and re-use.
Values
OpenCitations’ main priority is to keep its services, software and data always without charge under open licenses (CC0 for data ISC for software) for fostering maximum reuse.
In compliance with its priorities, OpenCitations is engaged in I4OC and I4OA, and espouses the following values:
- I4OC principles that citation data should be Structured, Separable, and Open.
- UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science
- FAIR data principles, that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable
- Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure.
Mottos
“OpenCitations for Open Science”
“OpenCitations is a plural: together we are OpenCitations”
Voice and Tone
When communicating about OpenCitations, consider the following characteristics:
- Independent: OpenCitations cannot be sold or acquired
- No fees for services, data access or software: OpenCitations charges no fees for any of its services, for access to any of its data, or for reuse of its software. OpenCitations members, donors and third parties all have equal free access.
- Community-driven and Academia-based: OpenCitations’ governance is based on the feedback and guidance from the stakeholder’s community. OpenCitations is owned and run by the academic community, not by a commercial company. This ensures that it is not at risk of arbitrary closure for commercial reasons.
- Global in scope: OpenCitations data coverage is universal, not limited to a particular scholarly domain (e.g. biomedicine, computer science, or humanities), nor to the English language, nor restricted by imposed acceptance criteria.
Messaging Guidelines
OpenCitations should be referred to as an ‘open infrastructure organization’.
OpenCitations name should be written as follows:
- OpenCitations (**do not** separate the words “open” and “citations”)
- OC
This short description can be used for communicating OpenCitations’ mission and purposes:
- “OpenCitations is an independent not-for-profit infrastructure organization for open scholarship dedicated to the publication of open bibliographic and citation data by the use of Semantic Web (Linked Data) technologies. It is also engaged in advocacy for open citations, particularly in its role as a key founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). For administrative convenience, OpenCitations is managed by the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata at the University of Bologna.”
For more details and messaging on OpenCitations Mission and Benefits, please read the documents OpenCitations Mission Statement and The Uniqueness of OpenCitations .
Read the OpenCitations E-Book (developed within the OpenAIRE-Nexus project for further and concise messaging:
The Logo of OpenCitations
Introduction
The new logo of OpenCitations is a combination of FOUR elements, each of those with a specific meaning related to the vision and aims of OpenCitations.
Letter O: the initial letter of “Open”. For OpenCitations, “open” is a crucial value and a final purpose.
Letter C: the initial letter of “Citations”. The two letters O and C summarize the mission of OpenCitations, which is to provide open citation data.
Eye: the eye gives an “human” connotation to the OpenCitations logo, which thus becomes a distinctive mascot of OpenCitations. It also has a symbolic meaning, representing the curiosity and exploration in research, not just the eyesight, but also the “investigator eye” of a questioning mind.
Citation Markups: the angle brackets are part of the <cite> HTML element which is used to the mark up the title of a cited creative work. They are a symbolic reference of the semantic web technologies adopted by OpenCitations.
1. Primary Logo
- Use the primary logo in all instances unless the secondary logo applies.
- Maintain clear space around the logo.
- Do not alter the colours of the logo.
Download the primary OpenCitations logo with a white background
Download the primary OpenCitations logo with a transparent background
2. B/W Logo
- Use the B/W logo on dark backgrounds.
- Do not alter the colours of the logo.
Download the primary B/W OpenCitations logo with a white background
Download the primary B/W OpenCitations logo with a transparent background
3. Secondary Logo
- Use the secondary logo if you have limited space.
- Maintain clear space around the logo.
- Do not alter the colours of the logo.
Download the secondary OpenCitations logo with a white background
Download the secondary OpenCitations logo with a transparent background
4. Secondary B/W Logo
- Use the secondary logo if you have limited space.
- Use the logo on dark backgrounds.
- Do not alter the colours of the logo.
Download the secondary B/W OpenCitations logo with a white background
Download the secondary B/W OpenCitations logo with a transparent background
Logo Misuse
- Do not alter the proportions of the logo.
- Do not change the colours of the logo.
- Do not add additional elements to the logo.
Colour Palette
OpenCitations Violet: #aa5bf9
OpenCitations Blue: #3e48e1
Typing Colour: #3c3c3c
Background Colour: #FFFFFF
Typography
The font used is Aqua Grotesque, a font that provides for a personal and commercial “free” use created by Laura Pol: https://www.behance.net/gallery/14884671/AQUA-GROTESQUE-TYPEFACE
It is a particular font, very pleasant on the lettering of the graphic sign but it is NOT to be used for long texts. In combination, especially on documents, it is recommended to use system fonts, whether serif or san serif. In particular, Georgia (serif) or Verdana (sans serif) is recommended. These are two fonts with a good degree of readability, also in relation to the accessibility of the contents.
Logo License
The logo license is being updated.
Contact Information For further inquiries or assistance, please contact us at comms@opencitations.net