Before accessing our services, we encourage you to get the OpenCitations Access Token.

What is the OpenCitations access token?
The OpenCitations access token is an opaque string that anonymously identifies a unique user of the OpenCitations’ APIs. Users can use the access token when calling the APIs of OpenCitations by passing it as a value for the key access-token in the header of any API call.

How to get the OpenCitations Access Token?
Getting the OpenCitations Access Token is thus easy. It only requires the insertion of your email address before accessing OpenCitations services. OpenCitations assigns an access token only if authorized to do so by each user, who can request a token by inserting his/her email address into the form and clicking “Get token”. After the submission of such a request, each user will receive a personal access token by email.
OpenCitations will not store the email address or any personal information, so the users’ privacy will be totally safeguarded.

How to use the OpenCitations Access Token?
If you are going to use the OpenCitations REST APIs within an application/code you need to specify the OpenCitations Access Token in the "authorization" header of your REST API call. Here is a usage example in Python:

from requests import get

API_CALL = "https://opencitations.net/api/v1/metadata/10.1108/jd-12-2013-0166"
HTTP_HEADERS = {"authorization": "YOUR-OPENCITATIONS-ACCESS-TOKEN"}

get(API_CALL, headers=HTTP_HEADERS)

Please save your personal token and reuse it for all your future OpenCitations REST APIs requests.

Why get the OpenCitations Access Token?
Use of an OpenCitations Access Token is not compulsory; however, it will help OpenCitations incredibly, by enabling us to monitor the number of the unique users accessing our data and services. Obtaining a token when using OpenCitations will take the user only a few seconds and needs to happen only once. Thereafter, it will permit OpenCitations to have clear anonymized evidence of the number of institutions and researchers that use our services (either occasionally or regularly), and thus will provide evidence of the real relevance of OpenCitations in the research environment.

Getting the OpenCitations Access Token is voluntary, easy, and does not cost anything to you. However, it could help OpenCitations a lot. Thank you!