From little acorns . . . A retrospective on OpenCitations | OpenCitations blog

"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. A little over eleven years ago, on 24 April 2010, I spoke at the Open Knowledge Foundation Conference, OKCon2010, in London, on the topic OpenCitations: Publishing Bibliographic Citations as Linked Open Data I reported that, earlier that same week, I had applied to Jisc for a one-year grant to fund the OpenCitations Project (opencitations.net). Jisc (at that time ‘The JISC’, the Joint Information Systems Committee) was tasked by the UK government, among other things, to support research and development in information technology for the benefit of the academic community. The purpose of that original OpenCitations R&D project was to develop a prototype in which we: harvested citations from the open access biomedical literature in PubMed Central; described and linked them using CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology [1]; encoded and organized them in an RDF triplestore; and published them as Linked Open Data in the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC)...."