Re: How can we improve? Tell us in the OpenCitations Community Survey

Dear Sarven,

Thank you for completing the survey and sharing your feedback.

Indeed, you are correct that OpenCitations currently focuses on third-party published research objects (either by publishers or available in existing open repositories), including peer-reviewed literature and other kinds of bibliographic resources, such as software and datasets, that are not necessarily peer-reviewed. However, OpenCitations does not yet systematically include self-published semantic citations - even if the OpenCitations Data Model already comprehends the possibility to specify the citation intent via CiTO properties, as you suggest in the referenced document provided in the previous message.

Your point highlights an important discussion about how "open" could be broadened in the future. At the same time, we want to emphasise that openness is, indeed, a core principle of OpenCitations. Our commitment includes:
 * freely providing access to our services, data (licensed in CC0), and software (licensed with open-source software licences) to everyone; * using interoperable, machine-readable, and open formats and standards; * promoting transparency and reproducibility in scholarly communication.While there is always room to expand coverage, these principles ensure that openness remains central to the project. This is further reflected in our adoption of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures, our advocacy through the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA), and our support for initiatives such as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information (DORI).

Anyway, your suggestion to include self-published semantic citations is valuable and will be carefully considered as one of the possible plans for future development.

Thank you again for your engagement. We greatly appreciate your input and welcome further ideas from the community.

The OpenCitations Team

On Wednesday, November 19, 2025 10:04 CET, Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca> wrote:
 On 2025-11-19 09:39, comms@opencitations.net wrote:
> I am sharing this message on behalf of *OpenCitations <https://
> opencitations.net/>*, an open scholarly infrastructure that provides
> open bibliographic and citation data to support transparent,
> reproducible, and community-driven research.
> As a community-based initiative, OpenCitations aims to maintain a direct
> and meaningful connection with its users, supporters, and all those who
> engage with our resources.
While I've applauded this effort in the past, as I understand
OpenCitations, it is still limited to third-party controlled research
communication. "Open" in "OpenCitation" is used loosely.

OpenCittions does not acknowledge peer-reviewed works with "semantic
citations" [1] that are self-published by authors on the "open" web.

I've submitted the survey FWIW. It'd be great if once day OpenCitations
could can aim higher re "open".


[1] https://csarven.ca/linked-research-decentralised-web#semantic-citations

-Sarven
https://csarven.ca/#i