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

More arm-waving notes on taxonomic databases. I've started to add data to ChecklistBank and this has got me thinking about the issue of data quality.

Quick notes to self following on from a conversation about linking taxonomic names to the literature. There are different sorts of citation: Paper cites another paper Paper cites a dataset Dataset cites a paper Citation type (1) is largely a solved problem (although there are issues of the ownership and use of this data, see e.g. Zootaxa has no impact factor.

Note to self (basically rewriting last year's Finding citations of specimens). Bibliographic data supports going from identifier to citation string and back again, so we can do a "round trip." 1. Given a DOI we can get structured data with a simple HTTP fetch, then use a tool such as citation.js to convert that data into a human-readable string in a variety of formats.

Yesterday I gave a lightning talk at the 2021 OASPA Conference, with the title OpenCitations – what does the future hold? The poster accompanying my talk, published on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526713, is reproduced below. Here is what I said: = = = Most of the talks at this conference have focussed on open access to textual content.

Quick note on a tool I've been working on to parse citations, that is to take a series of strings such as: Möllendorff O (1894) On a collection of land-shells from the Samui Islands, Gulf of Siam. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1894: 146–156. de Morgan J (1885) Mollusques terrestres & fluviatiles du royaume de Pérak et des pays voisins (Presqúile Malaise). Bulletin de la Société Zoologique de France, 10: 353–249.

Note to self. The challenge of finding specimen citations in papers keeps coming around. It seems that this is basically the same problem as finding citations to papers, and can be approached in much the same way. If you want to build a database of reference from scratch, one way is to scrape citations from papers (e.g., from the "literature cited" section), convert those strings into structured data, and add those to your database.

I'm giving a short talk at the Workshop On Open Citations And Open Scholarly Metadata 2020, which will be held online on September 9th.

[What happens when you cite someone’s research?]{style=“color: #434343; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt; font-weight: 400; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;”} [As you write a research publication you include references to the work of your fellow researchers.

Jo McEntyre, EMBL-EBI; Thomas Lemberger, EMBO; Mark Patterson, eLife; Kristen Rattan, Collaborative Knowledge Foundation; Alfonso Valencia, Barcelona Supercomputer Centre. The use of preprints in the life sciences offers tantalising opportunities to change the way research results are communicated and reused, and the work of ASAPbio has been key in engaging the scientific community to promote their uptake.