Imperial College London

Henry Rzepa

The topic of open citations was presented at the PIDapalooza conference
and represents a third component in the increasing corpus of open
scientific information.

David Shotton gave us an update on [ ]{.ev-save}[Citations as First
Class data objects -- Citation
Identifiers](https://pidapalooza18.sched.com/event/DJ3P/citations-as-first-class-data-objects-citation-identifiers#){#1b46a989e9da37f7d7e160c8aa73c822
.name} and introduced (me) to the
[blog](https://opencitations.wordpress.com) where he discusses this
topic. The citations or bibliography has long been regarded as an
essential, and until recently inseparable, component at the end of a
scientific article. It is also a component easily susceptible to "*game
play*". Authors can be tempted to self-cite themselves, possibly to
excess and perhaps worse, to cite their friends and colleagues for other
than purely scientific reasons. There are other issues. Thus to infer
the context of any particular citation, one has to read the text where
it is cited and this too can be subjected to *game play. *One may have
to "read between the lines" to try to judge whether the citation is
being cited favourably as supporting any case being made, or instead to
indicate disagreement with the cited authors. An article that is being
cited because one disagrees with the conclusions therein may still go on
to contribute to the cited author's "h-index" of esteem. So there are
various aspects of citations that deserve improvement, or certainly
development and evolution.

Shotton told us that many publishers are now releasing article citations
as open (CC0) data in their own right, as urged to do so on the
[Initiative for Open Citations](https://i4oc.org) site. A corpus of some
13 million of these are now [available ](http://opencitations.net/) as
RDF triples with a SPARQL end-point. This latter means that semantic
searches of the corpus can be undertaken. So what are the benefits?
Worthy aspirations such as *to explore connections between knowledge
fields, and to follow the evolution of ideas and scholarly disciplines
(*similar in fact to the new [Dimensions
product](https://www.dimensions.ai/) I discussed in the previous
post). When I probed into the various sites linked above, I had in mind
to identify some clear scientific outcomes of making them available in
this manner, perchance even in the field of chemistry. When I succeed I
will follow-up on this post, but at the moment I am not yet in a
position to illustrate these benefits with chemical stories. If anyone
reading this post has such, please let us know! 

I will conclude here by noting much discussion at universities of the
future of the scientific article itself; whether it should be
increasingly mandated as GOLD Open Access (made so by payment of an
article processing charge, or APC, by its authors), or whether journals
should retain the hybrid publishing models where only a proportion of
articles are GOLD, and the remainder are paid for by subscription fees
for licensing access to the non-GOLD articles in the journal. Meanwhile,
in what seems sometimes as a separate conversation, the article itself
is being dis-assembled into components such as open and/or FAIR data,
open citations, infographics, social media and yes, even blogs. Are
these two evolutions headed in different directions? Certainly, I think
the future is not what it used to be!

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[https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390){target="_blank"
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The topic of open citations was presented at the PIDapalooza conference and represents a third component in the increasing corpus of open scientific information. David Shotton gave us an update on  Citations as First Class data objects – Citation Identifiers and introduced (me) to the blog where he discusses this topic.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

First, Open Access, then Open (and FAIR) Data, now Open Citations.