| Organization | OpenCitations |
| Type of organization | Other |
| Country | Italy |
| Types of benefits | Access to open research information has enabled OpenCitations to integrate and connect information from multiple sources, improve the coverage and quality of its citation data, and reduce dependence on proprietary databases. It has also supported greater interoperability and reuse, making it possible to build shared infrastructure and services for the wider research community. |
| Stakeholder groups that benefit | OpenCitations and its community of users and contributors have benefited, including researchers, librarians, research managers, open infrastructure providers, publishers and organisations involved in research assessment. More broadly, the benefits extend to anyone developing services or analyses that rely on open and interoperable research information. |
| Story | OpenCitations was founded on the principle that citation information should be part of an open and interconnected research information ecosystem. Open research information has been fundamental to making this vision possible. By accessing and combining openly available scholarly metadata and citation information from different sources, OpenCitations has been able to build and continuously expand open citation datasets. Open information allows these sources to be connected, thus improving the coverage, quality and usability of the resulting data while reducing dependence on proprietary citation indexes. This openness also creates important benefits for OpenCitations as an infrastructure. Rather than working with isolated or closed datasets, we can build on information that can be accessed, linked and reused by different systems and communities. This supports interoperability, reduces duplicated efforts and makes it easier to develop shared services and tools around citation data. The benefits extend beyond the organisation itself. Researchers, librarians, research managers, infrastructure providers and others can reuse OpenCitations data to develop analyses, applications and services without requiring proprietary access to citation databases. Open research information therefore creates a virtuous cycle: openly available information enables OpenCitations to build open infrastructure, which in turn makes research information more accessible and reusable for the wider community. |
| Relevant links | Databases: https://download.opencitations.net/
Article: Heibi, I., Moretti, A., Peroni, S. et al. The OpenCitations Index: description of a database providing open citation data. Scientometrics 129, 7923–7942 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05160-7 |
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| License | CC0 / public domain dedication |
| Date | 2026-09-01 |