OpenCitations (I4OC) – Open Citation Index of Scientific Publications

Abstract

Despite of gradual commonness of documenting scientific research on the basis of open access and other concepts related to ‘Science 2.0’, scientific works published in this way are still only a ‘complementary’ activity of scientists. This is particularly the case when the evaluation of scientific activity is based on ‘hard’ bibliometric indicators calculated on the basis of ‘recognized’ data sources which usually gather information only about works published at ‘prestigious’ publishing houses. Calculating similar indicators for publishers/platforms supporting publishing in accordance with the concepts of ‘Science 2.0’ is currently difficult due to problems with calculating the cumulative value being the resultant value of indicators presented on specific platforms. This is due to the fact that each publisher or platform usually gathers only a subset of the author's work, and because these subsets may not be separable, the simple summation of the number of quotations of partial values  published by each of the entities will not allow to calculate the correct cumulative value. The article presents the OpenCitations initiative, which, using the recognized standards, proposes a citation index ontology, according to which it collects and provides data in the form of citation graph structures. Open standards and free access to collected data make the initiative of OpenCitations an interesting direction for the integration of various data sources about citations, which will allow to calculate easily the cumulative/global indicators and the possibility of acquiring the entire corpus of collected data will open perspectives for implementation of more sophisticated bibliometric own research.