Peroni, S. (2022) ‘OpenCitations: a short introduction’, ULITE-ws: Understanding Literature References in Academic Full Text at JCDL 2022, CEUR Workshop Proceedings.

Open citations advance transparent, reusable scholarly metadata through open, structured, machine-readable citation infrastructures. OpenCitations, open citation data, scholarly metadata, Semantic Web, FAIR principles, bibliometrics, research assessment, Linked Open Data, COCI, open science, Open citations constitute a decisive epistemic infrastructure for contemporary scholarship because they transform bibliographic references from static textual appendices into structured, separable, identifiable and reusable data capable of sustaining transparent research evaluation. Peroni’s account situates this development within the broader history of the Web, from early aspirations for a universal citation database to the emergence of Semantic Web publishing and the institutional consolidation of OpenCitations as an organisation committed to open bibliographic and citation data . The pivotal intellectual claim is that citation data become genuinely open only when they are machine-readable, detached from paywalled source documents, legally reusable without restriction, and linked through persistent identifiers or URLs; the diagram on page 3 crystallises these requirements through the five principles of structured, separate, open, identifiable and available citation data. As a case study, COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, exemplifies this paradigm by publishing citation relations as Linked Open Data, accessible through APIs, SPARQL endpoints and downloadable dumps, thereby enabling reproducible bibliometrics, more equitable discovery mechanisms and non-proprietary alternatives to commercial citation indexes. Yet the paper also exposes a structural tension: infrastructures that must remain free, open and community-governed require durable financial support to resist enclosure. Consequently, OpenCitations should be understood not merely as a database, but as a normative architecture for open science, where scholarly memory becomes collectively auditable, reusable and institutionally accountable.