DOI wanted - community involvement in open citations

Open citations are an important cogwheel in the engine of open scholarly infrastructure. At the same time, their development shows both the power and limitations of established parties, restricting their potential use for the wider scholarly community. For example, the quality of open citations as metadata provided by publishers is often still suboptimal. It can be argued that stricter requirements as to the format and quality of such metadata would discourage publishers from supplying them in the first place (thus slowing the growth of the number of open citations made available). In combinaton with limiting the supply of open citation metadata to publishers, though, a catch-22 situation is created that limits the quality of open citations, and thus, their usability. Simultaneously, commercial parties have ingested these incomplete metadata and improved on them, only to subsequently monetize their use in applications without contributing back to the underlying corpus of open data. While there is rightly no limitation on the use and reuse of open citations, I would like to explore models that would better allow the scholarly community to contribute to the quality and value of open citations metadata on one hand, and encourage their sustainable use on the other hand. The former could be envisioned through forms of crowdsourced improvement of open citations metadata (in which Wikidata could play an important role). An example of the latter would be the monetization of services built on enriched open citation data, without enclosing the data itself. Both models would enable the scholarly community as a whole to not only make optimal use of open citations, but also contribute to their value. By making the wheels turn smoother, we'll collectively get further!