Jodi Schneider of DERI has posted on her blog at http://jodischneider.com/blog/2010/10/18/cito-in-the-wild/ a most helpful description of how to employ CiTO properties characterizing bibliographic citations as tags for references in CiteULike. Thanks, Jodi!

Egon Willighagen, at Uppsala University, has pioneered the use of object properties from CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology, to characterize bibliographic citations in CiteULike, the free service for managing and discovering scholarly references.  Indeed, it was his use case that persuaded me of the need to generalize CiTO to include indirect citations.

This blog post is to introduce the first four ontologies of SPAR, the Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies, an integrated ecosystem of generic ontologies shown diagrammatically in the ‘flower’ diagram below (Figure 1). The ontologies can be used either individually or in conjunction, as need dictates.

One of the biggest challenges faced by modern scientists is information overload. The life sciences are probably the area most affected by it, with almost a million new entries being added to PubMed each year.

The Open Citations Project is global in scope, designed to change the face of scientific publishing. It aims to make bibliographic citation links as easy to use as Web links. Its goals are three-fold: To establish OpenCitations.net, a public RDF triplestore for biomedical literature citations.

Open Access can offer universities real cost saving benefits, claims Alma Swan in a report – ‘Modelling Scholarly Communication Options: Costs and Benefits for Univeresities’, published in February 2010 (download here: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/442/). Swan claims that the move to Open Access can ‘disrupt systems and processes that have been in place for a very long time’ (page i, Executive Summary) but the report makes it clear that it