One year of the opencitations corpus: Releasing RDF-based scholarly citation data into the public domain

Abstract

Reference lists from academic articles are core elements of scholarly communication that permit the attribution of credit and integrate our independent research endeavours. Hitherto, however, they have not been freely available in an appropriate machine-readable format such as RDF and in aggregate for use by scholars. To address this issue, one year ago we started ingesting citation data from the Open Access literature into the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), creating an RDF dataset of scholarly citation data that is open to all. In this paper we introduce the OCC and we discuss its outcomes and uses after the first year of life.