Community, governance, and shared goals : these are the key concepts that you would have heard discussed, had you listened in on September 21 at the Open Science Fair 2021 to the sessions entitled “ScholeXplorer and OpenCitations as the new frontier of open citation indexing” and “The perils of being invisible.

No-one is quite sure of the total number of scholarly publications within the global corpus. Indeed that number will be strongly influenced by the degree to which, in addition to books and journal articles, one includes within the definition of scholarly publications ‘grey literature’ such as reports published by official bodies, patents, etc.

We are happy to announce OpenCitations’ participation in a number of online conferences and events during the next few weeks. Our directors Silvio Peroni and David Shotton will be speaking at the Open Science Fair 2021, the OASPA Conference 2021 and Open Access Tage.

It’s been a month since the announcement of 1.09 Billion Citations available in the July 2021 release of COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations.   We’re now proud to announce the September 2021 release of COCI, which is based on open references to works with DOIs within the Crossref dump dated August 2021.

I’m becoming increasingly interested in the academic literature on predatory publishing, especially the differing definitions and argumentative strategies these articles use to illustrate the problem of poor-quality publishing.

UK Research and Innovation today published its updated policy on open access. For journals, the policy is simplified and normalised across the disciplines. Immediate open access under CC BY is mandated (with exceptions considered on a case-by-case basis), meaning no embargoes for green open access. Hybrid publishing will not be funded by UKRI where the journal in question does not have a transitional agreement.

As rumours circulate about the forthcoming UKRI open access policy announcement, fierce lobbying is underway by publishers worried that the policy may undermine their business models. Elsevier has even taken the step of directly emailing their UK-based academic editors to criticise the rumoured policy and encourage academics to relay the publisher’s views to UKRI.

This is a summer of great news for OpenCitations. Thanks to the generous support received from the scholarly community during the first year of SCOSS adoption, we’re happy to announce the appointment of three new colleagues to work for OpenCitations at the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata (University of Bologna).

It is common knowledge that the academic publishing industry is oligopolistic: a handful of large corporate publishers control the vast majority of the industry. Because it dominates so much of the industry, the oligopoly maintains market power through tentacular economies of scale and control of the publications which libraries must access.

The interconnection between Wikipedia and Wikidata is now larger than ever.   The Wikipedia Citations dataset currently includes around 30M citations from Wikipedia pages to a variety of sources – of which 4M are to scientific publication.