OpenCitations recalls what has achieved over the past year, in terms of technical developments, community building, and internal organization.

Chiara Di Giambattista

2023 has arrived, and it's the time to put aside the old agendas and to
fill the freshly printed organizers with new tasks. However, it is also
worth looking back over the achievements of the past year.

So, before consigning 2022 to the archives, we want to take a moment to
recall and celebrate all that OpenCitations has achieved over the past
year, in terms of technical developments, community building, and our
own internal organization.

#### **Clarifying our objectives**

Since its foundation, OpenCitations has been presented to the scholarly
community as a infrastructure organization guided by the values of
openness, equity and accessibility. In 2022, we publicly clarified our
mission, our aims and our unique points by publishing these three
documents:

- [OpenCitations Mission Statement](https://zenodo.org/record/6976670)
- [The Uniqueness of OpenCitations](https://zenodo.org/record/6976696)
- [OpenCitations -- Present Status and Future
  Plans](https://zenodo.org/record/6976691)

In addition, we continued to monitor OpenCitations' compliance with the
[Principles of Open Scholarly
Infrastructure.](https://openscholarlyinfrastructure.org/) Because one
area in which we were still falling short involved stakeholder
involvement in OpenCitations' governance, in 2022 OpenCitations started
reflecting on its organizational structure by creating a Governance
Evolution Working Group. In addition, we explored the further
development of our stakeholder community by establishing a parallel
Community Building Working Group. These two small working groups,
involving members of the OpenCitations International Advisory Board,
will continue to meet throughout 2023 to develop strategic plans
concerning OpenCitations open governance structure and outreach.

#### **More people, more tools**

In 2022, OpenCitations welcomed two new full-time developers to its
team: Arianna Moretti as software developer, and Ivan Heibi as the
person responsible for OpenCitations' technical infrastructure. As of
January 2023, the OpenCitations team consists of our two directors
Silvio Peroni and David Shotton, our administrator and research manager
Claudio Fabbri, myself as our communications director and community
development manager, and our four developers: Giuseppe Grieco (software
and systems developer), Arcangelo Massari (developer of OpenCitations
Meta), Arianna Moretti (software and indexes developer), and Ivan Heibi
(technical infrastructure manager). This team meets weekly at the
Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata within the University of
Bologna.

This enlarged technical workforce has been crucial in the development of
the two new OpenCitations indexes, DOCI (citations from DataCite) and
POCI (citations from PubMed), and our new database of bibliographic
metadata, OpenCitations Meta, all of which were released in December
2022:

- [DOCI](https://opencitations.net/index/doci), the OpenCitations Index
  of DataCite open DOI-to-DOI citations, is an RDF dataset containing
  details of all the citations that are specified in the most recent
  dump of DataCite metadata. The citations available in DOCI are treated
  as first-class data entities, with accompanying properties including
  the citations timespan, modelled according to the
  [OpenCitations](https://opencitations.net/model)
  [Data](https://opencitations.net/model)
  [Mod](https://opencitations.net/model)[el](https://opencitations.net/model).
  Its first release (December 2022) contains information on 169,822,752
  citations from 358,277 bibliographic resources.
- [POCI](https://opencitations.net/index/poci), the OpenCitations Index
  of PubMed open PMID-to-PMID citations, is an RDF dataset containing
  details of all the citations from publications bearing PubMed
  Identifiers (PMIDs) to other PMID-identified publications, harvested
  from the National Institutes of Health Open Citations Collection
  (NIH-OCC). As for DOCI, the citations available in POCI are treated as
  first-class data entities, with accompanying properties including the
  citations timespan, modelled according to the [OpenCitations Data
  Model](https://opencitations.net/model). Its first release contains
  717,654,703 citations from 26,024,862 bibliographic resources.
- [OpenCitations Meta](https://opencitations.net/meta) database stores
  and delivers bibliographic metadata for all the publications involved
  as citing or cited publications in the citations recorded in the
  OpenCitations Indexes. For each publication, the metadata exposed by
  OpenCitations Meta includes the publication's title, type, venue (e.g.
  journal name), volume number, issue number, page numbers, publication
  date, and identifiers such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and
  PubMed Identifiers (PMIDs). In addition, OpenCitations Meta includes
  details of the main actors involved in the document's publication,
  i.e., the names of the authors, editors, and publishers, each with its
  own additional metadata and identifier (e.g. ORCID). Its first release
  (December 2022) contains information on 87,321,593 bibliographic
  entities, 277,750,235 authors and 2,359,301 editors (counted by their
  roles, without disambiguating individuals), 710,226 publication
  venues, and 17,268 publishers.

As can be seen on [OpenCitations
roadmap](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1519), we have many tasks
already scheduled for 2023, and for this reason OpenCitations team needs
to expand further: we now seek applicants for [a new Research Fellow
position](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/3299) to work on the
further development of the OpenCitations technical infrastructure from
April 2023.

#### **Our role in the community**

Throughout 2022, the OpenCitations team has participated both online and
in person in a number of international events, presenting details of
OpenCitations to potential stakeholders and to Open Science experts, and
connecting with similar organizations.

In October, OpenCitations organized our third workshop, [the Workshop on
Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata
2023](https://workshop-oc.github.io/)[,]{.underline} as a three-hour
online event, to gather together and connect researchers, publishers and
policy makers interested in the creation, reuse and improvement of open
citation data and open scholarly metadata. The invited speakers provided
a broad overview of the current state and future development of open
bibliographic metadata and the scholarly record, and the role of
OpenCitations in research assessment.

We have participated in two major European research and development
project: In the context of the EC-funded project
**[RISIS2](https://www.risis2.eu/)** we released the new database
OpenCitations Meta and the index DOCI, while within the
[**OpenAIRE-Nexus**](https://www.openaire.eu/openaire-nexus-project)
project network we continue to provide open bibliographic citations as
part of the open data components of OpenAIRE and the European Open
Science Cloud. During 2022, the OpenAIRE team supported our activities
in many areas, with a particular attention to communication and
dissemination, as we explained in our blog post [**OpenCitations and EC
funding: OpenAIRE Nexus and
RISIS2**](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1510).

The end of 2022 brought with it two new exciting collaborations that
will be developed during the coming year: the inclusion of OpenCitations
in the [Jisc
Collection](https://www.jisc.ac.uk/jisc-collections)[s](https://www.jisc.ac.uk/jisc-collections),
thereby permitting UK institutions to support OpenCitations through
[JISC](https://www.jisc.ac.uk/)[;]{.underline} and our involvement in
the [GraspOS](https://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/2269) project
(starting date January 1, 2023) as an open and trusted federated
infrastructure for next-generation research metrics and indicators.

#### **Continuing support**

At OpenCitations **we are deeply grateful to all our members and
donors** that have supported us financially so far, thus making it
possible to enlarge our team, maintain our technical infrastructure, and
work on our new data releases.

Much of our success has been due to our selection as an infrastructure
worthy for inclusion in the [SCOSS second pledging
round](https://scoss.org/how-it-works/current-funding-calls/) in 2019.
SCOSS helped us get in touch with a wider community, and enabled
OpenCitations to have an increasingly significant role in the research
environment. OpenCitations is now part of the [SCOSS
family](https://sparceurope.org/meet-the-family-open-infrastructure-group-to-collaborate-with-the-view-to-exchange-knowledge-and-build-an-open-science-infrastructure-community-of-practice/),
the community of all SCOSS-supported infrastructures, that provides a
framework of mutual support for the the Infrastructures during their
growth and a safety net should troubles occur along the path.

However, OpenCitations still has a long way to go along the path from
being a *sustainable* open infrastructure to becoming a ***sustained***
open infrastructure providing reliable and invaluable services to our
global stakeholder community. There are still many long-planned
activities that we hope to initiate in the near future, given sufficient
resources. This is why OpenCitations requires ongoing support from the
scholarly community as our three-year period of SCOSS sponsorship draws
to a close. All the information you may require to start helping us
financially is available on the OpenCitations website:
<https://opencitations.net/membership>.

**2023 has just started. With your support, you can help us in making it
an impactful year for OpenCitations and the Open Science community as a
whole.**


2023 has arrived, and it’s the time to put aside the old agendas and to fill the freshly printed organizers with new tasks. However, it is also worth looking back over the achievements of the past year.  So, before consigning 2022 to the archives, we want to take a moment to recall and celebrate all that OpenCitations has achieved over the past year, in terms of technical developments, community building, and our own internal organization.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

OpenCitations’ 2022: one year, numerous outcomes