Chiara Di Giambattista

2021 is just behind us. Since January is "the Monday of the months", as
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote[\[1\]](#_ftn1){#_ftnref1}, it's a good
time to take stock of what happened at OpenCitations during the past
year.

Among the numerous events, achievements and challenges that 2021 brought
with it, we want to highlight five milestones which make us proud to
look back:

**1. We extended our coverage to well over one billion citations**

During 2021, OpenCitations' largest index
[COCI](https://opencitations.net/index/coci) (the OpenCitations Index of
Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations) was able to include for the first
time the citation links involving references that had been opened at
Crossref by Elsevier and the American Chemical Society, thereby greatly
expanding its coverage. The [last release of
COCI](https://twitter.com/opencitations/status/1465254495387103234/photo/1)
(November 2021) is based on open references to works with DOIs within
the Crossref dump dated October 2021, and, as a result, COCI now
contains information on more than 1.23 billion citations involving
almost 70 million publications.  
A [recent
analysis](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1420){data-type="URL"
data-id="https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1420"} by Alberto
Martìn-Martìn (Facultad de Comunicación y Documentación, Universidad de
Granada, Spain), published on the OpenCitations Blog in October, shows
that the citation coverage provided by OpenCitations is approaching
parity with that of the leading commercial citation indexes, Web of
Science and Scopus, offering a viable alternative upon which to base
open and reproducible metrics of academic performance.

**2. OpenCitations team grew**

Last summer, [we
appointed](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1240){data-type="URL"
data-id="https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1240"} Claudio Fabbri as
our Administrator and Research Manager to take responsibility for the
day-to-day administrative and financial activities of OpenCitations;
Chiara Di Giambattista as Communications Director and Community
Development Manager to take care of all communications and community
interactions made on behalf of OpenCitations; and Giuseppe Grieco as our
new Software and Systems Developer to take charge of technical
development related to the OpenCitations services.

Thanks to the support from the [OpenAIRE Nexus
project](https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101017452), the team has
also recently welcomed [Arcangelo
Massari](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1427) as our new Software
Developer to take care of the development of the new database
OpenCitations Meta. We anticipate further appointments during 2022!

Our [International Advisory Board](https://opencitations.net/about) met
in November, and we thank its members for the valuable advice they
provided. The Board will meet again later this month.

**3. We participated in many international meetings**

During the past year, OpenCitations' directors Silvio Peroni and David
Shotton took part in numerous international conferences, webinars and
workshops, including the LIBER Annual Conference 2021, the OS Fair 2021,
OASPA 2021 and FORCE2021. These provided excellent opportunities to
describe and promote OpenCitations, to reach out to new potential
stakeholders, and to discuss with other experts the main themes of our
activities and plans as they relate to Open Science.

The year ended with a bang, with the announcement during the closing
session of FORCE2021 that the 2021 [Open Publishing Award for Open
Data](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1464) had been awarded to
OpenCitations.

**4. We received a world of support**

In 2021, thanks to our involvement in the [SCOSS funding
campaign](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/date/2019/12){data-type="URL"
data-id="https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/date/2019/12"} and to our
commitment to reaching out to the libraries and universities potentially
interested in OpenCitations, we gathered a wide international community
of stakeholders and supporters around us. We are deeply thankful to the
6 consortia and 56 institutions across the globe which are now
supporting us financially, thus making it possible for us to enhance our
services and expand our team. You can find the full list of our
supporters on the [OpenCitations
website](https://opencitations.net/about) and in this recent Thank You
video:

<figure
class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio">
<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
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<div id="player">

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aufgetreten.</h1>
<div class="submessage">
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QUY3sTYp0g"
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aktiviere JavaScript, falls es in deinem Browser deaktiviert sein
sollte.
</div>
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</figure>

Additionally, in [January
2021](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1212){data-type="URL"
data-id="https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1212"}, we started our
involvement in the EC-funded [OpenAIRE Nexus
project](https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101017452), bringing us
into closer collaboration with our European colleagues and
infrastructures, including [OpenAIRE](https://openaire.eu/). The main
aim of the project is 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". In
OpenCitations, we're thrilled to be part of this collaborative project
by providing open bibliographic citations as part of the open data
components of OpenAIRE and the EOSC.

**5. We set the stage for future developments**

Thanks to the research grants and the support and endorsement we have
received from the international scholarly community, we are now working
on a variety of new services, thus **s**etting our goals for the coming
years. In particular, we want to enhance OpenCitations partnerships and
dialogue with the scholarly community; to collaborate with colleagues to
develop new services that will expand our citation coverage, including
new OpenCitations indexes of
[NIH-OCC](https://doi.org/10.35092/yhjc.c.4586573), of
[DataCite](https://datacite.org/) and of other sources of open
references, that will all be searchable through a single API; and to
create OpenCitations Meta, our new database that will hold comprehensive
bibliographic metadata of the publications involved in our indexes
citations, thereby enabling faster query responses and the ability to
host citations involving publications lacking
DOIs[\[2\]](#_ftn2){#_ftnref2}.

[\[1\]](#_ftnref1){#_ftn1} F. Scott Fitzgerald (2002). The beautiful and
damned (page 50 in the original 1922 edition); United Kingdom: Dover
Publications.
<https://www.google.it/books/edition/The_Beautiful_and_Damned/-tUoAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0>

[\[2\]](#_ftnref2){#_ftn2} Silvio Peroni, David Shotton; OpenCitations,
an infrastructure organization for open scholarship. *Quantitative
Science Studies* 2020; 1 (1): 428--444.
doi: [https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00023](https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00023){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}


2021 is just behind us. Since January is “the Monday of the months”, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote[1], it’s a good time to take stock of what happened at OpenCitations during the past year.

Five reasons why 2021 has been a great year for OpenCitations

What should an open scholarly infrastructure look like? 

An answer to this tough question can be found in the original February
2015 blog post by Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin and Cameron Neylon

Bilder G., Lin J., Neylon C. (2015) [Principles for Open Scholarly
Infrastructure](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/principles-for-open-scholarly-infrastructures/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"} , <http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859>

and in the summary of the principles to be found as:  

Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2020), *The Principles of
Open Scholarly Infrastructure*, [https://doi.org/10.24343/C34W2H](https://doi.org/10.24343/C34W2H){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"} : 

"*Infrastructure at its best is invisible. We tend to only notice it when it fails. *
*If successful, it is stable and sustainable. Above all, it is trusted and relied on
by the broad community it serves. Trust must run strongly across each of
the following areas: running the infrastructure (governance),
funding it (sustainability), and preserving community ownership
of it (insurance)".* 

These areas are fully define the [Principles of Open Scholarly
Infrastructure
(POSI)](https://openscholarlyinfrastructure.org/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}, which provide a set
of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organizations and initiatives that support
the research community can be run and sustained.  

As far as we are aware, Crossref was the first infrastructure to publish
its compliance with POSI, detailed in Geoffrey Bilder's December 2020
blog post

[Crossref's Board votes to adopt the Principles of Open Scholarly
Infrastructure.  
](https://www.crossref.org/blog/crossrefs-board-votes-to-adopt-the-principles-of-open-scholarly-infrastructure/){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}

OpenCitations too espouses POSI and, in January
2021, we monitored the extent of our own compliance with POSI, the
results of which are shown in the following diagram. 

**Governance** 

::: {.wp-block-columns .is-layout-flex .wp-container-6}
::: {.wp-block-column .is-layout-flow style="flex-basis:100%"}
<figure class="wp-block-table is-style-stripes">
<table class="has-fixed-layout">
<colgroup>
<col style="width: 33%" />
<col style="width: 33%" />
<col style="width: 33%" />
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Coverage across the research enterprise </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#06bc03">We gather citations from
global scholarship </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#ff0206">●</span> </td>
<td>Stakeholder governed </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#ff0206">Advisory board </span><br />
<span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#ff0206">currently
lacks</span><br />
<span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#ff0206">executive power
and is not elected </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Non-discriminatory membership </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#06bc03">Membership open
to all those espousing <br />
open science </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">● </span></td>
<td>Transparent operations </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#06bc03">Everything is open </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Cannot lobby </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#06bc03">OpenCitations lobbies to achieve open <br />
scholarly citations <br />
and bibliographic <br />
metadata; <br />
it does not engage in political or financial <br />
lobbying </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Living will </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#06bc03">Since all our data open, others can <br />
recreate our service </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#ff8c00">●</span> </td>
<td>Formal incentives to fulfill mission &amp; wind-down </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#ff8c00">No formal plan
for wind-down </span><br />
<span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#ff8c00">has yet been drawn up</span><span
class="has-inline-color" style="color:#f4f119"> </span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</figure>
:::
:::

**Sustainability** 

<figure class="wp-block-table">
<table class="has-fixed-layout">
<colgroup>
<col style="width: 33%" />
<col style="width: 33%" />
<col style="width: 33%" />
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Time-limited funds used only for time-limited activities </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#06bc03">Grant income should </span><br />
<span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#06bc03">be used solely for grantprojects </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#ff8c00">●</span> </td>
<td>Goal to generate surplus </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#ff8c00">Goal not yet realized – <br />
income so far too limited </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#ff8c00">●</span> </td>
<td>Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for
12 months </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#ff8c00">Goal not yet realized – <br />
income so far too limited </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Mission-consistent revenue generation </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#06bc03">Membership fees and <br />
solicited donations </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Revenue based on services, not data </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#06bc03">All data and
services freely given to community, and thus do not <br />
generate income </span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</figure>

**Insurance** 

<figure class="wp-block-table">
<table class="has-fixed-layout">
<colgroup>
<col style="width: 33%" />
<col style="width: 33%" />
<col style="width: 33%" />
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Open source </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#06bc03">All software
under open source licenses </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Open data </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#06bc03">All data available <br />
under CC0 waiver </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Available data </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#06bc03">All data available via REST APIs, SPARQL
endpoints, query interfaces and data dumps </span></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td><span class="has-inline-color" style="color:#00ff2a">●</span> </td>
<td>Patent non-assertion </td>
<td><span class="has-inline-color"
style="color:#06bc03">We will not <br />
patent anything: <br />
OpenCitations’ <br />
infrastructure <br />
is free to replicate </span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</figure>

   
We at OpenCitations are proud of the results reached in the Insurance
area, but realise that we still have some was to go in
the other areas. Although the general situation
is already satisfying, we are working to strengthen our weak points. 


What should an open scholarly infrastructure look like?

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Five reasons why 2021 has been a great year for OpenCitations

OpenCitations’ compliance with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure