Partner Projects
Since its foundation in 2010, OpenCitations has existed for the people who use its data for research purposes every day, and thanks to the support received from the global scholarly community. With its valid services and numerous ongoing activities, OpenCitations has quickly become a well-acknowledged infrastructure that perfectly fits into the current Open Science environment. OpenCitations collaborates with international networks and projects which share similar values, and that made it possible for OpenCitations to expand its team and accomplish significant milestones.
Funding applications and R&D projects
LUMEN
2025 – ongoing
The LUMEN project is an initiative to advance cross-domain collaboration and discovery processes in four academic fields: Mathematics (Maths), Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), Earth System Science (ES) and Molecular Dynamics (MD). Through interdisciplinary solutions spanning all four domains, LUMEN sets out to significantly improve discovery by innovation, simplifying initial research phases and facilitating access to advanced AI-powered tools for researchers. LUMEN aims to transform and strengthen EOSC services by promoting innovative and customisable solutions for data discovery. LUMEN thereby seeks to attract new users while simultaneously fostering Open Science principles.
GRAPHIA
2025 – ongoing
GRAPHIA aims to create the first comprehensive Social Science and Humanities (SSH) Knowledge Graph designed to integrate fragmented data into a unified entry point. The focus is on disciplines within SSH, which contribute essential knowledge to society influencing culture, economics and ethical decisions among other factors. The project is expected to run from January 2025 to December 2027. Part of OpenCitations’ personnel working at the University of Bologna is involved in GRAPHIA for the development of tools to enable data extraction from PDFs, and OpenCitations itself serves in the project as a source of information for the Knowledge Graph.
GraspOS
2022 – ongoing
At the end of 2022, OpenCitations signed an agreement with the GraspOS project (which started on January 1, 2022), to be integrated into an open and trusted federated infrastructure for next-generation research metrics and indicators. GraspOS aims to build and operate a data infrastructure to support the policy reforms and pave the way towards a responsible research assessment system that embeds OS practices and accelerates its adoption in Europe. GraspOS will focus on extending the EOSC ecosystem with tools and services that will facilitate monitoring the use and uptake of various types of research services and outputs (publications, datasets, software), and will catalyse the implementation of policy-level rewards to foster OS practices.
European Research Council
2023 – 2024
In 2023, OpenCitations has received a grant (Service Contract ERCEA/2023/VLVP/0007) from the European Research Council, to appoint personnel to work on the mapping of OpenCitations identifiers to OpenAlex identifiers in the context of the project “PIDs for containers”.
OpenAIRE Nexus
2021 – 2023
The funded OpenAIRE Nexus project started on 1 January 2021 and ended in June 2023. OpenCitations was involved (through the University of Bologna) in the preparation of a European consortium bid, with ten other partners, several of which were already working actively in OpenAIRE, in response to an H2020 call (INFRAEOSC-07-2020 – Increasing the service offer of the EOSC Portal). The main aim of the project was to create a framework of services for assisting in publishing research, monitoring its impact, helping promote its discovery, and integrating it into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) for the benefit of the open science community worldwide. OpenCitations’ role in this was to provide open bibliographic citations as part of the open data components of OpenAIRE and the EOSC.
RISIS2 Project
2021 – 2022
The Research Infrastructure for Science and Innovation Policy Studies (RISIS) is a project funded by the European Union under Horizon2020 Research and Innovation Programme Grant Agreement. RISIS2 gathers 18 partners aiming to transform the field of STI studies into an advanced research community. OpenCitations was involved in the project in December 2021 through a third-party agreement. The project ended in December 2022, with the release of OpenCitations Meta and the new index DOCI as outcomes.
Wikipedia Citations in Wikidata
2021
The project improved the connection between Wikipedia and Wikidata by adding structured citation data to Wikipedia references. Linking to scholarly publications enhanced the discoverability of research-related articles and strengthened Wikipedia’s role as a source of social and policy influence. These citations enriched Wikidata, enabling new services like citation recommendation tools and supporting projects such as Scholia, OpenCitations, and various GLAM initiatives in finding relevant academic content linked to Wikipedia topics.
Wellcome Trust for Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus
2019 – 2020
The Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus (CCC) was a project funded by the Wellcome Trust from July 2019 to December 2020 (original closing date June 2020, extended by an additional six months due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Among the outcomes of the project, we developed a new Python module called oc-ocdm that structures data describing such in-text references and their context in a manner compliant with the OpenCitations Data Model, which was specifically expanded for this purpose. This module will be the building block for all the future OpenCitations software in charge of creating and manipulating open citation data. In addition, we have released the new version of the OpenCitations Data Model, we have defied the In-Text Reference Pointer Identifier (InTRePID), which is a new persistent identifier (PID) for in-text reference pointers, and we have created a new database, the Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus (CCC) containing the metadata describing the in-text references that we processed, drawn from the open biomedical literature. The grant received from this project covered the expenses for hiring developers to implement the various aspects related to the project.
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the OpenCitations Enhancement Project 2017 – 2018
The OpenCitations Enhancement Project, funded by the Sloan Foundation for 18 months from May 2017, was aimed at making the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC) more useful to the academic community both by significantly expanding the volume of citation data held within the Corpus, and by developing novel data visualizations and query services over the stored data.
Jisc for the OpenCitations Project 2010 – 2011
OpenCitations has formally started in 2010 as a one-year project funded by JISC (with a subsequent extension), with David Shotton as director, who at that time was working in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. The project was global in scope, and was designed to change the face of scientific publishing and scholarly communication, since it aimed to publish open bibliographic citation information in RDF and to make citation links as easy to traverse as Web links. The main deliverable of the project, among several outcomes, was the release of an open repository of scholarly citation data described using the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies, and named the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), which was initially populated with the citations from journal articles within the Open Access Subset of PubMed Central .
Communities and Networks
SCOSS Family 2023 – ongoing
OpenCitations is part of the “SCOSS Family” a community of practices bringing the SCOSS infras together to share experiences, address common challenges and start new projects together. The shared goal is to find pragmatic solutions for sustainable support for Open Science Infrastructures.
POSI Adopters
2022 – ongoing
OpenCitations espouses the POSI principles and monitors its compliance with them. We are part of the “POSI adopters” group, which gathers the organizations committed to POSI and interested in self and collective auditing.
SCOSS Second funding cycle
2020 – 2023
At the end of 2019, OpenCitations has been selected by the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) for their second round of crowd-funding support. They stated that OpenCitations aligns well with open science goals and is an innovative service – considering that open citation data are important to the community since they have the potential to support change in research assessment, and if successful could be a game changer by challenging established proprietary citation services.
Catalogues and Tools
Infra Finder (Invest in Open Infrastructure)
2024 – ongoing
Infra Finder, is a brand-new tool aimed at fostering discovery, adoption, and investment for open infrastructure services. Infra Finder was 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. Since May 2024, OpenCitations has been among the tools listed in Infra Finder: https://infrafinder.investinopen.org/solutions/opencitations
OpenAIRE Catalogue
2023 – ongoing
The OpenAIRE service catalogue is an on-demand online platform that presents a comprehensive list of services in support of Open Science. The catalogue registers, hosts, and gives visibility to services operated by OpenAIRE and by third-party entities active in the Open Science scholarly communication domain. Initially built to showcase the list of OpenAIRE’s portfolio services, it evolved over time to become a world-wide registry of Open Science services fully integrated with the EOSC Service Catalogue. It acts today as an intermediate service to third party Open Science stakeholders that wish to register their services to the EOSC ecosystem. OpenCitations is listed as part of the “ASSES” Portfolio: https://catalogue.openaire.eu/service/unibo.opencitations/overview
JISC
2022 – ongoing
JISC is a United Kingdom not-for-profit company that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education institutions and research as well as not-for-profits and the public sector. In November 2022, OpenCitations and Jisc concluded an agreement to include OpenCitations in the Jisc Collections, thereby permitting UK institutions to support OpenCitations through JISC: https://subscriptionsmanager.jisc.ac.uk/catalogue/2899
Open Science Initiatives
Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET)2024 – ongoing
COMET is designed to enhance the completeness, consistency, and interoperability of metadata across the PID ecosystem. By prioritizing openness and inclusivity, COMET is establishing a curation model to facilitate a wide range of stakeholders to collectively enrich metadata. It respects persistent identifiers (PIDs) and their associated metadata as important shared sources of information and are committed to working closely with existing PID infrastructures. In all of its work, its model will emphasize responsible, equitable, and transparent practices that adhere to community-led governance standards. Building on the community’s metadata enrichment efforts, COMET’s model democratizes metadata creation while promoting shared accountability and collaboration.
Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information2024 – ongoing
The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information was launched in 2024 to lead a change of Research Information towards openness collectively. OpenCitations is among the supporters of the Declaration, and fully embraces its four commitments: (1) making openness of research information the default, (2) working with services and systems that support and enable open research information, (3) supporting the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information, and (4) working together to realize the transition from closed to open research information.
CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment (OI4RRA) 2023 – ongoing
The CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment started its activities in 2023 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. The University of Bologna’s personnel working in OpenCitations is involved in the WG ideation and activities.
I4OC and I4OA 2017 – ongoing
OpenCitations is engaged in advocacy for open citations, particularly in its role as a key founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and of the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA).