In March, The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) celebrated, together with the generous funders and the projects involved (including OpenCitations), the achievement of an amazing milestone: a total of 4 million Euros raised so far for supporting the growth and development of Open Science Infrastructures.

Chiara Di Giambattista

[Posted on August 10th 2022 by Chiara Di Giambattista]{.tadv-color
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In March, The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services
(SCOSS)
[celebrated](https://twitter.com/scossfunding/status/1509102675509579777/photo/1){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}, together with the generous funders and the projects
involved (including OpenCitations), the achievement of an amazing
milestone: a total of 4 million Euros raised so far for supporting the
growth and development of Open Science Infrastructures. This significant
sum is not just a number, but a concrete sign of the commitment of
numerous institutions all over the world to ensure the success of vital
organs of the Open Science ecosystem. Thanks to the pledges recently
made, the new infrastructures selected for the third SCOSS pledging
round have now started developing their services and can now look to the
future with more surety.   

At the end of 2019, OpenCitations [was selected by
SCOSS](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/991){data-type="URL"
data-id="https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/991" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"} for its second pledging round, and since then
much progress has been made. As the OpenCitations' founder and director
David Shotton recently stated: 

"OpenCitations is growing, thanks to the generous support from our
members and donors, and we thank SCOSS sincerely for bringing us into
contact with them. The citation coverage provided by OpenCitations is
now approaching parity with that of the leading commercial citation
indexes, and our ambition, within the next five years, is for
OpenCitations to be routinely used by our worldwide stakeholders as
their primary source of comprehensive scholarly citation
information".   

In 2020, OpenCitations monitored the achievements of the first year of
SCOSS support and shared the most important updates in a [blog
post](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1212){data-type="URL"
data-id="https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1212" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}. After a review from SCOSS Advisory Group and
the SCOSS Board, the OpenCitations 2021 report to SCOSS is now available
in the [SCOSS May
newsletter](https://mailchi.mp/scoss/help-us-design-scosss-future-15482432){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}. We're proud of the successful developments that 2021
brought with it in many areas, from the technical enhancements to
OpenCitations to its new supporters and partnerships.   

After a two-year-long collaboration, we in OpenCitations recognise that
one of the most precious benefits of being part of SCOSS is working
within a community: SCOSS not only provides a framework but also a real
family of supportive institutions that support the Infrastructures
during their growth and provide a safety net if troubles occur along the
path. The bi-monthly meetings organized by the SCOSS team enable
dialogue with the other infrastructures within the same pledging round,
while presentation and promotion to the institutions worldwide are
fostered by participation in webinars and conferences. During  2021,
OpenCitations participated in 16 events, and in 5 of them ([LIBER
Webinar
2021](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4564346){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}, [JISC Webinar
2021](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4704701){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}, [LIBER Annual Conference
2021](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5044765){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}, [Open Science Fair
2021](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJK2hJpxobA){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}, and [Open Access Tage
2021](https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.5535314){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}) OpenCitations' director Silvio Peroni gave talks
together with the representatives of others infrastructures involved in
the SCOSS second pledging round.   

In compliance with the [POSI
principles](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1260){data-type="URL"
data-id="https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1260" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}, SCOSS encouraged OpenCitations to set up an
open governance structure. As described
[here](https://opencitations.net/about){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}, the organizational bodies included in the
OpenCitations present governance are three: the Directors, the
International Advisory Board, and the Council. Although executive power
is still currently vested in the hands of the Directors, in the last two
years the OpenCitations International Advisory Board, a committee that
now comprises nine Open Science experts from different professional and
academic backgrounds, has had a crucial role in guiding the
OpenCitations activities, and it is now working on strategic
developments in terms of collaborations, policies, support and
governance. Moreover, last December OpenCitations organized a Webinar in
conjunction with its Annual Meeting to present and discuss with the
OpenCitations Council members OpenCitations' recent developments and
future plans.   

OpenCitations is highly reliant upon the connections we have created and
on people working together: thanks to the support we received throughout
the last two years, the OpenCitations team has grown and now includes
six people employed by the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata
at the University of Bologna, the administrative body for OpenCitations.
Besides the [previously
announced](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1240){data-type="URL"
data-id="https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1240" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"} appointments of Claudio Fabbri (Research
Manager), Chiara Di Giambattista (Communications Director and Community
Development Manager), Giuseppe Grieco (Software and Systems Developer),
and Arcangelo Massari (Software Developer, working within the
[OpenAIRE-Nexus
project](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1510){data-type="URL"
data-id="https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1510" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}), early in 2022 Ivan Heibi, Ph.D. candidate
at the University of Bologna, joined OpenCitations with responsibility
for the technical infrastructure, and Arianna Moretti, who recently
graduated in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge, joined as a
software developer. This enlarged team, involving young and motivated
researchers, is working on numerous projects to be announced later in
2022. You can learn more about OpenCitations' ongoing activities on our
[public
roadmap](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1519){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}.   

OpenCitations' aim continues to be the publication of open data
describing the bibliographic citations linking global scholarly
publications, with depth and scope, while maintaining the highest
standards of accuracy and provenance. Most importantly, OpenCitations
services will always be free, making global scholarly citation data
available at zero cost and without restriction for third party analysis
and re-use. 

With its support, SCOSS has been helping OpenCitations to pursue its
mission and spread the benefits of Open Science. However, 2022 will be
the last year of the three-year-long support ensured by SCOSS.
OpenCitations activities won't stop in 2023 --- indeed there still are
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. All the information *you*
may require to start helping us financially is available on the
OpenCitations website: 
[https://opencitations.net/membership](https://opencitations.net/membership){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"} 

By supporting OpenCitations, you will embrace and sustain the ideals and
vision of Open Science, and you will help in creating a more open,
democratic and fair knowledge environment.   


Posted on August 10th 2022 by Chiara Di Giambattista  ← Previous post: The OpenCitations Roadmap is now publicly available on Trello  → Next post: New documents that present OpenCitations’ mission, unique benefits, present status and future plans  In March, The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) celebrated, together with the generous funders and the projects involved (including OpenCitations), the achievement of an

Two years of achievements within the ‘SCOSS family’ (and it’s not over yet!)

OpenCitations Team

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. While
on-line publishing and bibliographic search engines have made the
problem of finding individual research articles considerably easier, the
present scholarly citation system inadequately exposes the knowledge
networks that exist within the scientific literature, linking papers,
authors and research projects.  Much of the problem stems from the lack
of freely available citation data in machine-readable form.

In this Open Access age, it is a scandal that reference lists from
journal articles, the core elements of the academic data cycle, are not
freely available for use by scholars.   Current citation services are
largely restricted to a small number of commercial companies whose
valuable products are still insufficiently developed to satisfy all the
needs of the academic community.

Google Scholar offers navigation through the citation network, but only
in one direction -- backwards. Thomson Reuter guards citation data in
ISI Citation Index and Web of Knowledge as commercial assets, as does
Elsevier for citation data in Scopus, with limited subscription-access
search and display capabilities, and no methods for extracting citation
data in bulk. Furthermore, they do not characterise the nature of
citations between publications.

The value of citation data to the research community has grown as
research evaluation has increased in importance. Citation metrics are
increasingly used by institutions to establish their research quality,
and by funding agencies to determine the effectiveness of their grant
spending.

**Citation data now need to be recognized as a part of the Commons --
those works that are freely and legally available for sharing and reuse
-- extending the Science Commons / Open Knowledge Foundation philosophy
to the world of scientific citation.**

If machine-readable citation data for all scholarly publications were to
be published freely on the Web, the construction and interrogation of
citation networks would become trivially simple, with enormous
advantages to scholarship. Thanks to CiteSeerX, citation data in
computer science have been freely available for several years,

Similar access is now coming for other fields of scholarship,
particularly for the biological sciences through CiteXplore. However, in
none of these cases are the citation data available as Linked Open Data,
and there are no convenient free tools, accessible to working research
biologists, that permit them to visualize and navigate the literature by
means of its citation network, or that permit knowledge analysts to pose
generic questions over the whole corpus, such as determining whether
those who publish in Open Access journals are more prone to cite other
Open Access articles, in comparison with those who do not.

This project will produce citation information as Open, Linked Data
which will address the short-comings of the current situation, aiming to
provide researchers with the tools to explore the citation network.


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.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Two years of achievements within the ‘SCOSS family’ (and it’s not over yet!)

JISC Open Citations: Wider Benefits to Sector & Achievements for Host Institution