OpenCitations

OpenCitations is a non-profit initiative that provides free and open data about scholarly citations and bibliographic metadata. Its goal is to support open science by making the citation network of scholarly literature available in machine-readable form for research, benchmarking, and infrastructure building.

The project hosts multiple datasets, most notably the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), a large collection of bibliographic records and citation links derived from open sources and represented in RDF and other machine-readable formats. It also develops and maintains the OpenCitations Index (OCI), a set of indexes that enable efficient querying of citation links and the cited-by network.

Data are accessible through open APIs and downloadable dumps. OpenCitations provides services that allow users to query for citations to a given work, references from a work, and network relationships among authors and venues. Data are offered in RDF and JSON-LD to support Linked Open Data and interoperability with other bibliographic resources.

Governance and funding: OpenCitations operates as a not-for-profit organization and collaborates with academic institutions, libraries, and research initiatives. It relies on public funding, grants, and community contributions to sustain its infrastructure and development.

Impact: The project is used by researchers to study citation behavior and by other open data and bibliometric initiatives. It emphasizes openness, reproducibility, and the ability to reuse data under open licenses.