Open Citations Corpus

OpenCitations is one of the most ambitious open-science infrastructure projects reshaping how scholarly citation data is accessed, shared, and reused. In a landscape where citation networks have long been locked behind commercial platforms like Web of Science and Scopus, OpenCitations offers a radically different model—fully open, machine-readable, and free citation data available to the world.

At its core, OpenCitations maintains open bibliographic and citation datasets such as the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC) and COCI (OpenCitations Index of Crossref-DOIs). These datasets provide structured citation relations—who cites whom—using open standards like RDF and JSON, enabling developers, researchers, and scientometric analysts to build their own tools, metrics, and visualizations without proprietary barriers. This openness is crucial for enabling transparent research assessment, reproducible bibliometrics, and democratized access to scholarly infrastructure.

Because OpenCitations relies on openly licensed metadata (primarily from Crossref and other open publishers), it continues to expand as more journals and publishers embrace open citation practices. The initiative also advocates for the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a movement aimed at persuading publishers to release citation metadata openly.

OpenCitations is not just a database—it is a public good, an infrastructure piece that empowers universities, librarians, digital scholarship teams, and independent researchers to conduct citation analysis, build knowledge graphs, track research influence, and develop alternative metrics without depending on closed commercial ecosystems.

As open science accelerates, OpenCitations stands out as a foundational, community-aligned initiative pushing scholarly communication toward greater transparency, equity, and accessibility.

Other similar tools are OpenCitations, Crossref, Dimensions, lens.org, and OpenAlex