As a community-based open infrastructure, our strength lies in collaboration. The insights, feedback, and experiences shared by our community partners are what help us refine our services and keep our mission aligned with the evolving global research ecosystem.

To continue building an infrastructure that truly reflects the needs of the scholarly community, we’ve now launched the OpenCitations Community Survey.

Whether you are a supporter, a partner institution, a user, or have simply come across OpenCitations by chance (even if you’ve never used our data or looked closely at what we do), this survey is your opportunity to share your experience, tell us what works, what could be improved, and what you’d like to see in the future.

Your insights will directly inform how we evolve our services and activities to better support your work, research, tools and, more generally, the circulation of open knowledge.

It takes about 10 minutes to complete, and every single response helps us strengthen OpenCitations as a community-driven open infrastructure.

Take the survey and help shape the future of OpenCitations:
https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/GYSZ230686

Whether you’re a researcher, service provider, librarian, or open knowledge advocate, we want the new site to help you engage more easily and meaningfully with our work. This new website is part of a wider rebranding initiative that began earlier this year. In February, we launched our new OpenCitations logo, reflecting our mission as a reliable and community-focused infrastructure for open scholarly metadata.  

This visual update now lives across the entire website, giving OpenCitations a refreshed identity while staying true to our core values.  

From the moment you arrive, you’ll notice a cleaner, more intuitive design. We’ve restructured the layout to improve usability and provide faster access to our core services, making it possible to perform multiple actions (search our data collections, discover our data dumps and perform API calls) through the boxes in the homepage  

Whether you’re exploring our databases or diving into documentation, everything is now easier to find and more clearly explained.  

A showcase of OpenCitations’ network and community   

OpenCitations has always been a community-driven infrastructure. With this redesign, we’ve placed our community, collaborators, and shared values front and center.  

• The About section offers a deeper look at what defines us, including our core values, our origins, our mission, and the unique strategic positioning of OpenCitations within the scholarly communication ecosystem, as well as a page presenting the team;   

• In the Support us section, you’ll find a clear explanation of the benefits and requirements of our membership program, along with a detailed FAQ for prospective supporters.  

• In the new Community section, you can learn about our partners, funded projects, and international collaborations.  

A new feature: subscribe to OpenCitations’ Newsletter!  

To mark the relaunch, we’re also introducing a new way to stay connected: the OpenCitations Newsletter!  

We’ll use it to share updates about our services, publications, datasets, events, and stories from our community. You can subscribe now via the link below:   

→  Sign up for the OpenCitations Newsletter  

This new website is the result of a collaborative effort between the OpenCitations team and our International Advisory Board, whose contributions we gratefully acknowledge. Their insight helped us build a platform that truly reflects the needs of our users and the broader research community.  

In this spirit, we would like to hear from our users, and anyone interested in OpenCitations’ work. That’s why we’ve added a dedicated Feedback section, where you can share your thoughts, questions, or suggestions. Your input helps us improve, grow, and continue building infrastructure that truly supports open scholarship.  

This new site is a foundation for future developments, new technical advancements, and deeper collaboration. We hope the redesign makes it easier for you to access our tools, understand our mission, and get involved.  

→ Visit the new website: https://opencitations.net  

Opening Research Assessment

Final Conference of the GraspOS Project

12–13 November 2025

CNR Area della Ricerca di Pisa, Italy

We are pleased to announce the Final Conference of the GraspOS project: Opening Research Assessment, taking place on 12–13 November 2025 in Pisa, Italy.

For research assessment to truly support Open Science, we must prioritise transparency, inclusivity, and fairness in how we recognise research activities and contributions. This means not only ensuring that all contributions to Open Science are valued but also promoting openness in the data, tools, services, and other resources used in the assessment process.

The Conference will present the results of the GraspOS project and engage in discussions on transforming research assessment into a system that is open, responsible and aligned with the principles of Open Science.

Invited talks and expert panels will address critical topics for advancing a responsible research assessment system that fully embraces Open Science principles including:

● Open infrastructures for responsible research assessment

● Transparent and inclusive assessment practices

● Recognition of contributions to Open Science

The event will be hybrid, free of charge, and registration will be required. A call for poster contributions aligned with these themes will open soon, and a detailed programme and registration link will follow shortly.

The conference will be followed by the final event of the CoARA Italian National Chapter on the afternoon of 13 November.

Stay tuned, and please save the date!

The GraspOS Project Team

Website: https://graspos.eu/graspos-conference-2025 

OPERAS coordinates the project with the purpose of significantly improving SSH data visualisation and analysis capacities through pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. The project addresses gaps in provision that leave SSH knowledge disconnected and poorly available. This will be accomplished by leveraging AI to create a Knowledge Graph that will deliver an expansive representation of knowledge in the diverse disciplines within SSH. GRAPHIA will empower researchers to uncover patterns and insight from unstructured data, illuminating social phenomena and cultural trends with clarity that is not available in current solutions.  

A major highlight of GRAPHIA will be an SSH Citation Index, an innovative framework for citation data extraction and enrichment to accelerate access to previous literature across the range of SSH disciplines. GRAPHIA integrates industry partners into this project to amplify the project’s impact by gaining the perspective and expertise from a range of stakeholders, reflecting the influence of SSH disciplines on society. Such collaboration will motivate innovations that apply to academics while being commercially viable, opening SSH disciplines and solutions to new markets and technologies. GRAPHIA is the signal of its partner organisations commitment to open science and increasing EU research infrastructures capabilities, enhancing global competitiveness, while facilitating broad and long-lasting impact of project results.

Part of OpenCitations’ personnel working at the University of Bologna is involved in GRAPHIA for the development of tools to enable data extraction from PDFs, and OpenCitations itself serves in the project as a source of information for the Knowledge Graph.

To follow the progress of the GRAPHIA project, join us on Bluesky and/or LinkedIn 

Contact GRAPHIA at: contact@graphia-ssh.eu

We have decided to name this character “Quirin”, a name which collects the four pillars of OpenCitations services: QUality; Integration; Reusablity and INteroperability. However, Quirin is not just a mascot but is an integral part of OpenCitations brand.  

Indeed, after two years of synergic work of ideation, consultation and implementation from the University of Bologna Communications office, the University of Bologna Graphic Design Office, and the OpenCitations Team,  with the strategic guidance from the International Board for OpenCitations,  we are now excited to unveil our new logo, marking an important milestone in the journey of OpenCitations as part of our ongoing rebranding activities (as preannounced in our last blog post). 

Why a new logo? 

Our previous logo has excellently served us since 2010, and its simple design and colours have become well recognisable from the community. However, over the years OpenCitations has evolved and grown, and it was time for a design that truly reflects who we are today and where we’re headed in the future. The new logo is strongly distinctive and different from any other logo (the similarity of the old OC logo with other brands was one of the main reasons for this change). Its uniqueness has made it possible to officially register it as a trademark within the EUIPO trademark office with the certification number 019045665. The new logo of OpenCitations will be soon available for download, both in its positive and B/W versions, on a dedicated GitHub repository. 

Our idea behind this new visual identity was to provide an evolution of the elements of the old logo and keep its iconic colours, thus providing a thoughtful blend of modern design elements and symbolic representations that speak to the essence of OpenCitations. 

Here’s a breakdown of the key elements:  

Letter O: The letter “O” is the first letter of “Open,” and for OpenCitations, “open” is a core value and ultimate goal. It represents our commitment to openness, transparency, and accessibility in the world of scholarly citations. The circle evokes a sense of continuity and inclusivity, key aspects of our mission to make citation data freely available to everyone. 

Letter C: The letter “C” stands for “Citations,” reflecting our core mission to provide open citation data. Together, the letters O and C form a visual summary of our work: making citations open and accessible to researchers, institutions, and the public. 

Eye: The inclusion of an eye adds a unique “human” element to the design, making the logo more than just a symbol—it’s a distinctive mascot for OpenCitations. The eye represents the curiosity and exploration that drives research, capturing the essence of a questioning mind. It’s not only about vision but also about seeking knowledge and discovering new perspectives in scholarly work. 

Citation Markups: The angular brackets, often associated with the <cite> HTML element used to mark-up citations, provide a nod to the technological foundations of OpenCitations. These brackets symbolize the semantic web technologies that we embrace, reinforcing our commitment to advancing research in the digital age. 

This new logo is more than just a fresh design—it’s a representation of who we are as an organization. It embodies the values that have always guided us: openness, curiosity, and innovation, as well as the involvement in our team of young and volcanic researchers. 

We believe that this new logo will help us better express the uniqueness and peculiarity of OpenCitations and inspire others to join us on our exciting journey, both in terms of community engagement and support.  

Also, this new logo release is just the first step of a whole revolution in the visual identity of OpenCitations, which will affect its main virtual showcase (but will say no more for now)…Stay tuned in the next few weeks for new, user-friendly, updates! 

2024 has been a transitional year, one where we’ve worked “in the shadows”, focusing on a series of behind-the-scenes improvements that will transform the OpenCitations experience for our users and services. Over the past few years, we have gathered valuable feedback from our community and have taken it to heart, using it to inform the enhancements to our infrastructure. These changes will be rolled out in the coming months of 2025, and we are excited to share a glimpse of what’s to come.

1. Strengthening the Foundations of the Technical Infrastructure

We closed out 2023 by announcing the redesign of our technical infrastructure, a crucial step for better managing OpenCitations’ data sources. This shift was necessary to enhance the efficiency of our processes and ensure scalability for the future. In particular, in recent months, our development team has been focused on addressing issues within OpenCitations Meta, to enable to set up again the usual bimonthly updates from one of our main data sources (i.e. Crossref). This work is essential to guarantee the timely release of the OpenCitations Index. 

We were happy to announce the July 2024 release of the Index, containing more than 2 billion citations, but we are now working to ensure that the release frequency is consistent throughout 2025. Our focus will be on maintaining a steady pace, ensuring regular updates, and improving the overall reliability of our data.

2.A Tool for Data Curation: HERITRACE

In addition to infrastructure improvements, we have been developing a new tool designed to streamline data curation: HERITRACE. This semantic data management system is tailored specifically for the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) sector. HERITRACE serves as an editor for curating bibliographic data, allowing users to track provenance and monitor changes over time. 

It has been tested in a small-scale project with a specific dataset, and early results have been promising. HERITRACE is designed to be user-friendly, offering non-technical users a seamless experience while providing an efficient administrative interface for technical staff. In comparison to other established platforms such as OmekaS, Semantic MediaWiki, Research Space, and CLEF, it stands out for its ease of use, provenance management, change tracking, and customization options. 

HERITRACE is built upon SHACL for data modeling and integrates the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM) for tracking provenance and changes. Looking ahead, we plan to expand its capabilities with the integration of a robust authentication system and broader data compatibility through the RDF Mapping Language (RML), making it an even more powerful tool for digital heritage management. 

In the context of OpenCitations, the goal is to use HERITRACE to enable curating bibliographic metadata and citation data by expert users (e.g. librarians), aiming at increasing the quality of the data OpenCitations provides. 

In the video below, our developer Arcangelo Massari provides a quick overview and tutorial of HERITRACE:

3.New and Ongoing Collaborations

During 2024, we have honoured the aspects of our mission statement describing community engagement as a core point in OpenCitations’ activities. These partnerships are vital to advancing OpenCitations’ purposes and goals, and we look forward to continuing the collective work into 2025. In particular, we expanded the network of partnerships and released some outcomes of previous collaborations:  

• Our project within the European Research Council (2023-2024) dedicated to the mapping of metadata collections between OpenCitations Meta and OpenAlex, has concluded. The full analysis is presented in the following article involving OpenCitations Developer Elia Rizzetto:  

Rizzetto, E.; Peroni, S., Mapping bibliographic metadata collections: the case of OpenCitations Meta and OpenAlex, in: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS, «CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS», 2024, 3643, pp. 155 – 168 (Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Information and Research Science Connecting to Digital and Library Science, IRCDL 2024, Bressanone – Brixen, Italia, 2024)  

• January 2025 has formally marked the beginning of two new exciting projects in collaboration with OPERAS and other institutional and industrial partners, building upon our previous work together within the GraspOS Project. During 2024, it’s been inspiring being involved in the work packages of the project, where we have kept collaborating with our colleagues from OpenAIRE. Also, GraspOS is doing a terrific job in the promotion of the news and initiatives of its community, through its newsletter, and its blog (where you can also find an exclusive interview with our Director and one with our Head of Comms – hi, it’s me!), so we suggest you subscribe and follow if interested in the theme of Open Science and Responsible Research Assessment.

• In April, we were included in Infra Finder, a tool developed by Invest in Open Infrastructure to foster discovery, adoption, and investment in open infrastructure services. The intuitive interface and usability make Infra Finder a helpful tool that could make OpenCitations and other infrastructure services more visible to a wider and diverse community. 

• We continued our participation in the SCOSS Family, the community of practice gathering the Infrastructures from SCOSS six pledging rounds, and we are now part of the internal working groups aimed at exploring ways of collaboration, sharing resources, creating impact and contributing to creating a stronger open ecosystem.  

• Lastly, OpenCitations is proud to be one of the supporters of the Barcelona Declaration, a key initiative launched in April 2024 aimed at fostering open access to scholarly information and advancing the principles of open science. This aligns perfectly with OpenCitations’ mission to promote transparency, accessibility, and collaboration in scholarly communication. By supporting the Barcelona Declaration, we reaffirm our commitment to the shared values of openness, inclusivity, and the democratization of knowledge, all of which are integral to creating a more equitable and accessible academic landscape for researchers, institutions, and the global community.  

4.Welcome and Farewell

Alongside the growth of our network, the OpenCitations team has also expanded, now counting 11 collaborators, including Research Fellows and PhD students, with the addition of Ivan Heibi as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Mario Petrella as Systems Administrator. 

Besides the enrichment brought in by our new colleagues, 2024 also brought a great loss. The founder and director of OpenCitations, David Shotton, passed away in May, leaving not only an institutional but, most of all, a human void, as a mentor and guide. We wanted to remember him in this blog post, which aims to serve as a virtual wall of tribute, constantly evolving, where anyone wishing to share a thought for David can do so by sending an email to comms@opencitations.net.  

5.Renewal of the International Advisory Board for OpenCitations

After four years of prolific collaboration, the end of 2024 also marked the conclusion of our International Advisory Board’s first term. We’d like to extend our deepest gratitude to the former members for their invaluable insights and guidance throughout their tenure. Looking ahead, we are thrilled of the new members who have decided to put their expertise at OpenCitations’ service, and we can’t wait to begin working closely with them in 2025.

6.Some Spoilers for 2025

As we close out this year’s reflections, we’re also looking ahead to 2025. In this upcoming year, we will begin to see the fruits of our work from 2024. We are committed to continuously improving our offerings and services for our users and the community that supports us. We exist because of them, and we are here to serve their needs. 

In the coming weeks, you will also notice some exciting changes: OpenCitations will be undergoing a rebranding, along with updates designed to make our virtual presence more engaging and user-friendly. We’ve heard feedback about how challenging it can sometimes be to navigate our information, and we’re eager to make improvements that will help our users find what they need more easily. 

Finally, we invite all our readers to participate in the 5th Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC), which will be held in Bologna on May 28-29, 2025. WOOC aims to gather anyone interested in the widespread adoption of practices for creation, sharing, reuse and improvement of open scholarly metadata. This year’s edition of the workshop will be a special one, gravitating around the following theme: “Open Access of Research Information”. 

In particular, the first day will be dedicated to the Bologna Meeting on Open Research Information, to encourage discussion between the signatories and supporters of the Barcelona Declaration and other interested bodies and collaboratively orient the common roadmap, thus allowing the articulation of the outcomes that have recently been discussed during the Paris Conference on Open Research Information. 

The second day will be dedicated to invited contributions, presentations and a poster session selected among the participants for the call for contributions on the workshop theme. 

While the submission period for contributions is closing tomorrow, January 31 (h.23:59 AoE), there will still be opportunities to register as participants after the deadline, at the following link: https://forms.gle/Z7J36XSdPa9tkSop7. Please visit https://workshop-oc.github.io/ for all the information. We look forward to meeting you in Bologna! 

The first structure of the Advisory Board was defined by the election, back in 2020, of eight members selected by the Council within the main scholarly stakeholder communities of relevance to OpenCitations (librarians, scientometricians, academics, publishers, funders, data service providers, etc.). These members have served OpenCitations for the last four years, and have accompanied and addressed some of the major changes in OpenCitations. Indeed, in the previous four years, OpenCitations has grown in team composition, community collaborations and data provision. In these years, our coverage approached that of the major databases, we have revolutionized our ingestion workflow to manage a growing number of data sources, and thanks to the involvement of some members of the Advisory Board in two internal working groups, we have been working on the stakeholder identification and governance evolution.  

It was right in the Governance Evolution working group that, in the last year, the need to renovate the International Advisory Board composition has emerged, intending to make the renewal process recurring every three years after the pilot experience with the first International Advisory Board. As an initial action resulting from the Governance Evolution Working group, we held the elections of the members of the new International Board on OpenCitations in the first week of December. The voting council selected eight members among ten candidates who strongly committed to open scholarship.  

We are now happy to announce the new members of the International Advisory Board, and while thanking them for their enthusiastic involvement in the Board, we also want to express our gratitude to the former Board members who have accompanied us in the last four years. The new International Advisory Board will also welcome one representative from OpenCitations’ Strategic Member (Scientific Interest Group of the French National Fund for Open Science) as a non-elected Board member. 

The new members of the International Board for OpenCitations are:  

Marcel R. Ackermann (Team Lead of dblp Computer Science Bibliography)  

Maria Gould (Product Director at DataCite and Director of ROR) 

Catriona MacCallum (Director of Open Science, Hindawi Open Access Publisher) 

Philippe Mongeon  (Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Information Science at University of Montreal)  

Cameron Neylon (Professor of Research Communications, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University) 

Iratxe Puebla (Director of Make Data Count) 

Dominika Tkaczyk (Director of Data Science at CrossRef)  

Didier Torny (on behalf of the French Open Science Committee) 

Ludo Waltman (Professor of Quantitative Science Studies and Deputy Director, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University) 

The International Advisory Board’s activities will start early in 2025, picking up the threads of the previous Board’s work. We look forward to working with relevant actors in the Open Science community.  

After the success of the 2023 edition, this edition of the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata (WOOC) will take place in Bologna, on 28-29 May 2025. – https://workshop-oc.github.io.  

SCOPE  

We invite to WOOC researchers, scholarly publishers, funders, policymakers, institutions, and open citations advocates, interested in the widespread adoption of practises for creation, sharing, reuse and improvement of open scholarly metadata. 

This year’s edition of the workshop will gravitate around the following theme: 

” Open Access of Research Information “ 

May 28 will be dedicated to the Bologna Meeting on Open Research Information, to encourage discussion between the signatories and supporters of the Barcelona Declaration and other interested bodies and collaboratively orient the common roadmap, thus allowing the articulation of the outcomes that have recently been discussed during the Paris Conference on Open Research Information. 

May 29 will be dedicated to invited contributions, presentations and a poster session selected among the participants in the call for contributions on the workshop theme. 

Participation in both days of WOOC 2025 is open to everyone. In particular, OpenCitations and the WOOC organizing committee aim to welcome the signatories and supporters of the Barcelona Declaration and anyone interested in Open Research Information to an interactive event that aspires to encourage the incubation of ideas and strategically orient the development of practices in open research information. 

The Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2025 will be an in-presence event organized in the spaces of the University of Bologna, one of the signatories of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information and CoARA, of which it is also leader of the CoARA National Chapter. 

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION AND CONTRIBUTIONS 

Application form: https://forms.gle/Z7J36XSdPa9tkSop7  

Application deadline: 13 January 2025, 23:59 AOE 

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 31 January 2025, 23:59 AOE

If you wish to participate in the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2025 as an attendee, please fill in the form by providing the requested information and a short bio to apply for the event. 

You will receive a notification of acceptance by 20 February 2025. In case of oversubscriptions, the organisers will select attendees from among those who have applied. 

If you wish to submit a proposal to the Workshop of Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2025, please fill in both the first part and the second part of the application form to submit a contribution that fits this year’s theme “Open Access of Research Information“. The organizing committee will decide if the selected submissions will involve either a talk of 15-minute duration, with a 5-minute discussion following, or a poster presentation accompanied by a 2-3 minute pitch talk. The workshop day dedicated to the presentation of the selected contributions will be May 29.

Take into consideration the selection criteria, and submission/author guidelines listed under. 

 SELECTION CRITERIA 

• • Relevance to the workshop theme 
  • Methodological rigor and depth of elaboration 
  • Interest and potential for interdisciplinary engagement 
  • Impact and broader implications 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES 

• • Contributions should be submitted in the form of a long abstract, ranging between 1250 and 1500 words. 
  • Accepted contributions will be limited to one presentation or poster per author. Similarly, we aim to avoid more than one presentation on a single initiative/project. 
  • Only submissions in English will be considered. 
  • Make sure that you have approval from your institution to participate in the conference at the latest when the results are announced. 
  • All submitted contributions will be peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers. 
  • Each accepted abstract will be published as conference paper with a dedicated DOI under the WOOC-2025 community on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/communities/wooc2025) 
  •  Selected contributions will be returned to the authors for the re-editing phase, formatted as a pre-compiled template in ODT format

AUTHOR GUIDELINES 

• • Word Count: Ensure your abstract stays within the specified limit of 1250–1500 words (including references). 
  • Structure: Start with the full title of your abstract, followed immediately by the names and affiliations of all authors. Organize the content into clear sections, for instance: “Purpose”, “Methods”, “Results”, and “Value” to provide a logical and coherent flow of information. 
  • Language: Write in English (either US or UK spelling is acceptable). Use clear, concise language to present your work, and ensure the text is free from grammatical errors and typos before submission. 
  • References: References can be included to provide context or support for the findings. All references must adhere to APA style.  

 FEES AND EXPENSES 

For the accepted attendees and contributors, we will request a small registration fee around €200 (exact amount to be announced). We will provide lunches and refreshments on all days, and a free workshop dinner on Wednesday 28 May.   

Those attending will be expected to cover the cost of their travel and accommodation, and a list of suggested hotels and guest houses is available here. 

Details of how to pay will be sent with the notification of acceptance and information to finalize the registration. 

IMPORTANT DATES 

Application deadline: 13 January 2025 EXTENDED DEADLINE 31 January 2025

Notification of acceptance (participation only): 20 February 2025 

Notification of acceptance (contributions): 10 March 2025 

Workshop dates: 28-29 May 2025 

All deadlines are h. 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth) 

VENUE 

Bologna is home to numerous prestigious cultural, economic and political institutions as well as one of the most impressive trade fair districts in Europe. In 2000 it was declared the European capital of culture, and in 2006, a UNESCO “city of music”. Bologna’s porticoes have been listed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021. 

The University of Bologna is the oldest university in the western world, and one of the largest universities in Italy (with about 90,000 enrolled students). 

For further information, please contact comms@opencitations.net  

The dblp computer science bibliography (https://dblp.org/) is the on-line reference for bibliographic information on major computer science publications, with the mission “to support computer science researchers in their daily efforts by providing free access to high-quality bibliographic meta-data and links to the electronic editions of publications”. 

Currently, dblp indexes over 7 million publications, published by more than 3.4 million authors. Despite the small team of editors from the Schloss Dagstuhl, which run the service, in the last few years, dblp has grown from a small-scale server to a service used by thousands of people worldwide. 

In 2022, they released the dblp Knowledge Graph, and in June 2024 they released a first major extension to the dblp KG by adding publications venues (e.g., journals and conference series) as first-class entities to the graph. This new release also includes a new property (i.e. dblp:omid) to link dblp publications to their OpenCitations Meta Identifier (OMID). This ID is crucial for making use of open citation and reference data available in OpenCitations since it is the internal identifier we use to identify every bibliographic entity (publications, authors, venues, etc.) stored in our system. 

Indeed, the dblp computer science bibliography doesn’t collect and store citation information itself, but instead ingest directly the open citation data released by OpenCitations. Using the linkage provided by OMID, the dblp users can perform citation analyses using its SPARQL query service. 

Dblp has published a detailed guide to help “beginners” find data in the dblp Knowledge Graph, and you can find it here. 

If you are looking for more information about the dblp project, please explore their exhaustive F.A.Qs. 

Thank you, dblp, for reusing OpenCitations data! 

The Founder and Co-Director of OpenCitations, Prof. David M. Shotton, peacefully passed away on Saturday, 18th May, after a long battle against illness. With his death, OpenCitations lost a Director, a Mentor, and a Guide. OpenCitations wouldn’t have existed without David’s foresight, which led him to design the first prototype of OpenCitations as a one-year project founded by JISC in 2010. Since then, David has closely followed the developments of his open infrastructure, to whose growth he has dedicated his considerations and intuitions almost until his last months. In one of his last authorial posts on this blog, he traces the history of OpenCitations, and his words show the pride of having seen the “little acorns” grow into a globally validated and trusted infrastructure.  

It’s impossible to overstate the gratitude that the entire OpenCitations team feels for David. OpenCitations, a living testament to his vision and guidance, is a result of his leadership. We were privileged to accompany David on this journey, witnessing the volcanic energy of his mind and benefiting from his wisdom and integrity.   

We want to dedicate this space on the blog to the words of those who knew him as a colleague in the context of his work in OpenCitations and the Open Science ecosystem but above all as a guide and a friend:  

David was an early, earnest, and ardent supporter of open. He was also fiercely committed to sustaining what he helped to build, and he worked tirelessly to ensure that OpenCitations would be resilient and active as a long-standing, trusted model and resource for others. His work on succession planning started many years ago, and I remember well when he first contacted me and Educopia in hopes that we could help the OpenCitations team to think through specific risks and how to plan to overcome them. He was equal parts determined and creative, and the stability and resilience of OpenCitations in this moment is one testament to his care and thoughtfulness. He will be sorely missed as a leader and perhaps also as a bit of a sage in this field.  Katherine Skinner (IOI) 

David was an inspiration.  Through each discussion, I felt his passion for our work and constant interest in learning from his friends and colleagues.  He was a role model to me, a great human being, and his impact is felt across the global research infrastructure space. John Chodacki (UC3) 

David’s importance for our work of course cannot be overestimated. I think I was introduced to David’s ideas and his way of thinking when I read his 2013 piece in Nature. This piece had a profound impact on my own ideas. If David had not written his 2013 piece, and if OpenCitations had not been established, my world would have been a very different one. I will remember David as someone who was always very gentle and generous. I still remember welcoming David and Silvio at CWTS in Leiden. David and I had a private chat and I complimented him for all the important work he was doing. David seemed to feel a bit uneasy about this and he repeatedly said that it was mainly Silvio, not him, who deserved to be complimented. My last contact with David took place earlier this year, when we were exchanging some emails. I was impressed by the positive tone of David’s emails. Rather than being sad about being terminally ill, he was thankful for all the things he could still enjoy and for everything life had offered to him. Ludo Waltman (CWTS) 

Three phases characterised my path with David. First, he was a mentor. When I was a PhD student at the University of Bologna, I was lucky to visit David’s lab at the University of Oxford. This period was crucial for me – on the one hand, for my PhD thesis and, on the other hand, for my academic growth and career. Then, after my PhD graduation, David became a colleague with whom we discussed and worked on several research topics that resulted, in the end, in the creation of a new instance of OpenCitations at the University of Bologna. This seed brought us where we are today. Finally, and most importantly, he was one of the dearest friends I’ve found in my life. Always supportive, constructive, and delicate in every situation – and that, I confess, is the part I miss the most. We have lost one of the most passionate and bright minds in the Open Science community, who has left us an enormous legacy we are called to preserve for future generations. I can only thank you, David, for what you donated to me and the whole community. Silvio Peroni (University of Bologna / OpenCitations) 

I am saddened to hear the news of David’s death. I worked with David on a number of projects when I was at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. I was involved with the institutional repository for publications and data, and developing related university services. David was a huge advocate of Open Access in its many guises: for publications, data, and infrastructure. He was a tour de force with a phenomenally quick and creative mind. He saw opportunities for funding to develop innovative tools and services around research data and publications, and was able to enthuse others to participate. I used his exemplar semantic data paper from 2009 (Reis, R.B. et al, 2009) many times when discussing data repositories, open access and the possibilities for 21st century publication models. He always had his eye on the future and the direction of travel for open services and infrastructure – he was inspiring. My condolences to his family, friends and colleagues. Sally Rumsey (Formerly: Head of Scholarly Communications and RDM, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)

A note from myself and also on behalf of colleagues in the Oxford e-Research Centre, who remember David as a friend and colleague during his time here. We have all been saddened to hear this news.
David and his team came to OeRC in 2013 (from the Department of Zoology) and were a most welcome addition, as David was a very significant voice in open science and scholarship – and an inspiration to our growing community, through his appearances at many meetups and gatherings. I had worked with him previously, in the Semantic Web and in the authoring of the FORCE11 Manifesto – David was one of the organisers of the Dagstuhl Seminar which initiated this important movement. I was proud later on to be able to play a small part in supporting the OpenCitations work.
David was also one of the key people in Wolfson College, along with Donna Kurtz and David Robey, who championed “digital research”. The collaboration with Donna, combining image expertise across sectors, saw the launch of a pioneering Linked Open Data project: the CLAROS virtual art collection. Stemming from this, David brought his enthusiasm to support an international collaboration with Chinese data, which continues today as part of the successful OSCAR advanced research centre.
The sad news has, with very fond memories, brought the original team back in touch again – including Graham Klyne and Jun Zhao who came with David from Zoology and have also made important interdisciplinary contributions. We all owe David huge gratitude for his passion, energy and insight, for all his support, and for the very significant influence he had on his colleagues and community. David De Roure and the colleagues of the Oxford e-Research Centre

I am saddened by David’s passing, but I’m sure his spirit lives on in the many lives he has touched. I was for several years a member of his Image Bioinformatics Research Group in the Zoology department of Oxford University, where he set a path for my late-stage career change to working in academia. He supported and embraced an open style of working that complemented the then-nascent open access movement for research publication. His visionary early adoption of web data technologies was rooted in a genuine concern for preserving access to important bioinformatic data that were at risk of being lost in the transition to digitization of research; he would often refer to his collection of micrograph slides that contained original recordings from his seminal work in unravelling biochemical structures. And I recall his kind support of many researchers who intersected his orbit and went on make significant contributions of their own. I feel that OpenCitations is a fitting legacy of David’s work, reflecting his scientific and scholarly concerns, and also his enthusiasm to engage a wide range of stakeholders. Graham Klyne (formerly Research Software Engineer at University of Oxford)

This post aims to be a virtual wall where anybody who has met or known David in the context of his lifelong commitment to Open Science can leave a message. If you wish to have your thoughts on David published here, please email comms@opencitations.net.