The OpenCitations Corpus: an open citations database for scientific publications

Despite the increasingly popular sharing of scientific knowledge by open access and other "Science 2.0" concepts, scientific papers published in this way are still only "complementary" activities of researchers. This is especially true in cases where the evaluation of scientific activity is based on "strict" bibliometric indicators calculated on the basis of "recognized" data sources, which usually gather information only about works published by "prestigious" publishers. Calculation of similar metrics for publishers / platforms supporting publishing under the "Science 2.0" concepts is currently hampered by the difficulty in calculating the cumulative value of the metrics presented on various platforms. This article presents the OpenCitations Corpus, which uses recognized standards, employs the leading  bibliographic ontologies, and collects and provides citation data in the form of linked open data graph structures. Open standards and free access to its collected data make the OpenCitations initiative an interesting direction for the integration of different citation data sources, allowing for cumulative / global metrics to be calculated, and the ability to download the entire corpus of data from this database will open the prospects for conducting more sophisticated bibliometric studies by interested researchers.