OpenCitations for Open Science - OpenAIRE Blog

OpenCitations is an independent not-for-profit infrastructure for open scholarship dedicated to publication of open bibliographic and citation data by the use of Semantic Web technologies. It provides more than one billion citations data which can be reused for any purpose and can be accessed via SPARQL endpoints, REST APIs, and that can be downloaded in bulk.  OpenCitations enables: fairness since it negates institutions and independent scholars having to pay tens of thousands of dollars annually (that most of them cannot afford!) for commercial access to their own scholarly data; reuse since there are no licence restrictions and all data are provided under CC0, so users can re-publish and reuse for any purpose the citation data that OpenCitations provides; research assessment, since we provide open data usable for national and international research evaluation exercises, enabling transparency and reproducibility; governance, since the community is directly involved in the evolution of the infrastructure. The citations available in our primary database COCI (the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations) are treated as first-class data entities, with accompanying properties including citation timespan, modeled according to the OpenCitations Data Model. "