Chiara Di Giambattista

At the end of 2019, OpenCitations [was
selected](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/991){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"} by **The Global Sustainability Coalition for
Open Science Service
([SCOSS](https://scoss.org/what-is-scoss/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"})** for presentation to the international scholarly
community for crowd-sourced sustainability funding, along with the
Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and the Directory of Open Access Books
(DOAB). Since 2017, SCOSS has been helping identify non-commercial
services essential to Open Science, and making recommendations that
these services should be considered for funding support by the global
OA/OS community of stakeholders (academic institutions and their
libraries, research institutes, publishers, funding organisations,
national and regional governments, international organisations, learned
societies and service providers worldwide, and everyone who is invested
in Open Access and Open Science).

Since OpenCitations is not-for-profit and all our data and services are
free, the relationship with SCOSS is crucial in maintaining and
developing OpenCitations' infrastructure and continuing to make our data
and service freely available.

Thanks to the renewed engagement and support from the OA/OS Community,
**2020** **has** **been** **a** **year** **of** **great**
**achievements** **for** **OpenCitations**.

As first described [here](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1066),
the starting point has been the set-up of an **initial open governance
structure**. For administrative convenience, OpenCitations is managed by
the [Research Centre for Open Scholarly
Metadata](https://openscholarlymetadata.org){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"} at the University of Bologna. Currently, the
organizational bodies included in the OpenCitations governance are
three: the Directors, the International Advisory Board, and the Council.
All these bodies are regulated and described in two documents,
"[Organizational Bodies and
Finances](http://opencitations.net/static/docs/bodies.pdf){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}", and "[Rules for
Membership](http://opencitations.net/static/docs/bodies.pdf){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}" that specifically describes the criteria for
Membership of OpenCitations.

The generous support received from OpenCitations' [donors and
members](https://opencitations.net/membership){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"} during 2020 is making it possible to pay for necessary
services and the salaries of personnel to support the daily activities
of OpenCitations, thus enhancing the administration of OpenCitations and
communication with new supporters and collaborators.

Separately, the involvement of OpenCitations in different funding
applications throughout 2020 has led to the successful development of
two projects.

The first one, **[OpenAIRE
Nexus](https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101017452){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}**, started on 1 January 2021 with the aim to create a
framework of services for assisting in publishing research, monitoring
its impact, helping promote its discovery, and integrating it into the
European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) for the benefit of the open science
community worldwide. OpenCitations' role in this will be to provide open
bibliographic citations as part of the open data components of OpenAIRE
and the EOSC.

The second project, the **Open Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus**,
funded by the Wellcome Trust from July 2019 to December 2020, had the
aim to expand the types of citation data provided by OpenCitations to
include information about each individual in-text reference and its
semantic context. This makes it possible, for example, to distinguish
references that are cited only once from those that are cited multiple
times, to see which references are cited together (e.g. in the same
sentence), to determine in which section of the article references are
cited (e.g. Introduction, Methods), and to specify the textual context
of each citation, thus potentially making it possible to determine the
function of the citation. Part of the grant received for this project
was used to cover the salaries and expenses of developers who worked on
the creation of a new persistent identifier (PID) for in-text reference
pointers, the **In-Text Reference Pointer Identifier
([InTRePID](https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11674032.v1){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"})** first described
[here](https://opencitations.hypotheses.org/1011), in the release of the
new version of the **OpenCitations Data Model**
**([OCDM](http://opencitations.net/model){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"})**, and the creation of a new database, the **Open
Biomedical Citations in Context Corpus
([CCC](http://opencitations.net/ccc){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"})** containing the metadata describing the in-text
references that we processed, drawn from the open biomedical literature.

Through its projects, OpenCitations has strengthened its connections
with data of topical urgency. A relevant and timely output, for
instance, was the creation of the **[Coronavirus Open Citations
Dataset](https://opencitations.github.io/coronavirus/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}**, which contains (as of 16 May 2020) information about
189,697 citations and about the 49,719 citing or cited articles involved
in these citations related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The involvement of OpenCitations in the SCOSS community has included our
participation to several **SCOSS-related events** (amongst others, the
SCOSS Webinar for the Couperin Consortium, the [JROST Conference
2020](https://investinopen.org/community/jrost-2020-conference/)), and
the Jisc Webinar [Sustaining the future of key open research
infrastructure services
(SCOSS)](https://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/sustaining-the-future-of-key-open-research-infrastructure-services-20-apr-2021)
in order to present OpenCitations to the OA/OS community, together with
the other Open Infrastructures selected in the first and second funding
cycles. In addition, during 2020 OpenCitations participated in several
**international conferences**, talks and meetups, including [PIDapalooza
2020](https://pidapalooza20.sched.com/) and the [International Semantic
Web Conference 2020](https://iswc2020.semanticweb.org/), and organized
and co-hosted the **[Workshop on Open Citations and Scholarly Metadata
2020](https://workshop-oc.github.io/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}** (September 2020), gathering scholars, policy makers,
publishers, and open scholarly data advocates.

Being part of the SCOSS network during 2020 has been an enriching and
stimulating opportunity. The support of the international coalition for
Open Science has resulted in a massive interest from European
governments and Institutions (including the French Government through
its [National Plan for Open
Science](https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/national-plan-for-open-science-4th-july-2018/),
the AgroParisTech, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Royal
Danish Library), and the involvement of the Canadian Research Knowledge
Network and the Council of Australian University Librarians. So far,
**2021 seems to be equally promising**, as judged by the increasing
support being shown by [US consortia for open
infrastructures](https://www.arl.org/blog/scoss-2021-update-library-consortia-create-path-for-funding-open-infrastructure/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}. Between May 2020 and April 2021 the US was responsible
for 19% of the traffic to OpenCitations services, and every month has
been listed in the top 4 countries using our data.

Despite the enthusiastic results, there's still much to be done: 2020
was the first year of a three-year-long collaborative journey, in which
OpenCitations will be moving forward with SCOSS **to create an open,
secured and inclusive future for science and research.**


At the end of 2019, OpenCitations was selected by
<strong>
 The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Service (SCOSS)
</strong>
for presentation to the international scholarly community for crowd-sourced sustainability funding, along with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). Since 2017, SCOSS has been helping identify non-commercial services essential to Open Science, and making

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

OpenCitations and SCOSS: one year of support