SCOSS FUNDING APPLICATION FORM, 2019 Please note that questions marked with “*” are weighted more highly in the evaluation than others. Deadline: 26 November 2019 For questions, email: [email protected] 1. General 1.1. ServiCe name Include full name, acronym and URL: OpenCitations (OC), http://opencitations.net 1.2. Name of organisation operating the service. Incl. acronym and URL Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy (FICLIT, UniBo), http://www.ficlit.unibo.it/it 1.3. Short desCription of tHe serviCe. What does it do and who does it serve? Please also included the country of the geographical home of the service. OpenCitations is a small independent scholarly infrastructure organization dedicated to open scholarship and the publication of open bibliographic and citation data by the use of Semantic Web (Linked Data) technologies. It is also engaged in advocacy for semantic publishing and, as a key member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), also for open citations. Dr David Shotton and Professor Silvio Peroni are its two Directors. It provided, maintains and updates the OpenCitations Data Model (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3443876) which is based on our widely used SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies (http://www.sparontologies.net), which may be used to encode all aspects of scholarly bibliographic and citation data in RDF, enabling them to be published as Linked Open Data (LOD). Separately, OpenCitations provides open source software of generic applicability for searching, browsing and providing APIs over RDF triplestores (https://github.com/opencitations). It has developed the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC, http://opencitations.net/corpus), a database of open downloadable bibliographic and citation data recorded in RDF and released under a Creative Commons CC0 public domain waiver, which currently contains information about ~14 million citation links to over 7.5 million cited resources. These are described using the OpenCitations Data Model, and are made freely available so that others may build upon, enhance and reuse them for any purpose, without restriction under copyright or database law. It has recently published a formal definition of an Open Citation (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6683855), and has launched a system for globally unique and persistent identifiers (PIDs) for bibliographic citations - Open Citation Identifiers (OCIs, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7127816) – which has been accepted by the community, and for which it maintains a resolution service at http://opencitations.net/oci. In addition, it is currently developing a number of Open Citation Indexes (http://opencitations.net/index), using the data available in third-party bibliographic databases. The first and largest of these is COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations (http://opencitations.net/index/coci), which presently contains information on more than 445 million citations, released under a CC0 waiver. Launched only last July, and pulling additional bibliographic information live from the Crossref API, COCI is already enjoying widespread use, with over one million API accesses between 1st Dec 2018 and 28th February 2019. Currently, the OpenCitations hardware, data and services are hosted at the University of Bologna in the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. 1.4. Year of establishment. 2010 (original prototype, University of Oxford); 2015 (new instance, University of Bologna). 1.5. Intentions for funding. In brief, describe your need for funding * The scholarly digital publishing landscape is undergoing a period of unprecedented disruptive change. As the open scholarship model gains traction, subscription models for access both to journal content and to citation indexes are crumbling, as evidenced by the Big Deal For questions, email: [email protected] 2 Cancellation Tracking website maintained by SPARC (https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big- deal-cancellation-tracking/), which presently lists in excess of fifty academic libraries, institutions and consortia that have cancelled their subscriptions to the journals of Elsevier and other major publishers, judging that they are no longer value for money. These libraries are now wondering how they might more strategically spend the considerable sums of money saved by these cancellations, totalling many millions of dollars. Of the subscription services that have yet to suffer in this manner are those for the citation indexes Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. Providing direct alternatives to the monopolistic position previously held by these two commercial indexes are new providers of free citation data such as Google Scholar (launched in 2004) and Dimensions (launched in 2018). However, these newer sources too lack APIs from which citation data can be downloaded in bulk, and have restrictions on the open publication and reuse of the citation data they provide. Offering a genuine alternative to all these commercial citation indexes is OpenCitations, which offers free access to a growing corpus of totally open and reusable citation data. If OpenCitations is to be successful in achieving sufficient coverage of the world’s citations that it can provide a genuine open alternative to the citation data provided by WoS, Scopus and other commercial sources, and thus make the world’s citation data freely available to everyone, it needs significant public funding to maintain and expand its activities, datasets and services. This application for adoption as a SCOSS funding recipient is made in direct response to that need. 2. Value of the service to the Open Access or Open Science Community 2.1. How does tHis serviCe fit into tHe Open SCienCe landsCape? Describe the service's general value to the Open Science / Open Access Community. How can you demonstrate your value as opposed to competing services? The development of the open scholarship (open science) movement can be characterised as having four phases: a) Open sourCe software, leading, for example, to the creation and widespread uptake of Linux as an operating system (https://www.linux.com/), and to the establishment of the Free Software Foundation (https://www.fsf.org/); b) Open aCCess publiCation, with the rise of new publishers such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS; https://www.plos.org/), the development of new publishing and peer review models including eLife (https://elifesciences.org/) and F1000 Research (https://f1000research.com/), and initiatives such as Plan S (https://www.coalition- s.org/); c) The increasing emphasis on the publication of open researCh datasets, with the developments of data repositories such as Dryad (https://datadryad.org/), support from organizations such as CODATA (http://www.codata.org/) and the Research Data Alliance (https://www.rd-alliance.org/), and infrastructures such as the european Open Science Cloud (EOSC, https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=open- science-cloud); and most recently, d) Open metadata, involving, for example, the Metadata Registry (http://metadataregistry.org/), that has grown from the Semantic Web Community's Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) to provide services for controlled vocabularies, and OpenCitations. The importance of open metadata to support learning and research, to disseminate knowledge and to foster innovation has been emphasised by the early Jisc-funded Discovery metadata ecosystem programme (http://discovery.ac.uk/), by the actions of leading academic libraries including Harvard University Library (https://emeritus.library.harvard.edu/open-metadata) and the British Library (https://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/pdfs/sharing-bl-open-metadata-non-library- communities.pdf), and by the recent conference DC-2018: Open Metadata for Open Knowledge (http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/dc-2018/). Open bibliographic metadata For questions, email: [email protected] 3 supports open scholarship, underpins bibliometrics and scientometrics, and facilitates the emerging field of study known as the Science of Science (also referred to as Research on Research). BibliographiC Citations — the links created when the author of a published work acknowledges other works in its bibliographic references — are one of the most fundamental types of bibliographic metadata, and are central to the world of scholarship. They knit together independent works of scholarship into a global endeavour, and are important for assigning credit to other researchers. The open availability of citation data is a crucial requirement for Open Science, since analyses of citations can reveal how scientific knowledge develops over time and can illuminate patterns of authorship (e.g. self-citations). Such information is essential for assessing scholars’ influence and making wise decisions about research investment. Bibliographic databases and citation indexes are also crucial to individual researchers, since they enable their use of automated tools to search the literature for papers of relevance to that scholar’s work. At present, the two most authoritative sources of citation data are Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (WoS), which grew from the Science Citation Index created by Eugene Garfield in 1964, and elsevier’s Scopus, launched in 2004. neither are open, most research universities having to pay tens of thousands of dollars annually to access one or both of them, while institutions and independent scholars