University of Oxford

David M. Shotton

Some folk are confused, but OpenCitations and the Initiative for Open
Citations, despite the similarity of their names, are two distinct
organizations.

OpenCitations (<http://opencitations.net>) is an open scholarly
infrastructure organization directed by Silvio Peroni and myself, and
its primary purpose is to host and build the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC),
an RDF database of scholarly citation data that now contains almost 13
million citation links.

In contrast, the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC;
<https://i4oc.org>) is a separate and independent organization, whose
founding was spearheaded by Dario Taraborelli of the WikiMedia
Foundation.  OpenCitations was just one of several organizations that
founded the Initiative for Open Citations, as documented at
<https://i4oc.org/#founders>.

I4OC is a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and
other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of
scholarly citation data, but it does not itself host citation data.

Within a short space of time, I4OC has persuaded most of the major
scholarly publishers to open their reference lists submitted to
Crossref, so that the proportion of all references submitted to Crossref
that are now open has risen from 1% to over 50%.

These references are now available for OpenCitations to harvest into the
OpenCitations Corpus and publish in RDF, as well as for others to
harvest and use as they wish.

All clear now?


Some folk are confused, but OpenCitations and the Initiative for Open Citations, despite the similarity of their names, are two distinct organizations.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

OpenCitations and the Initiative for Open Citations: A Clarification