OpenCitations: redesigning an open infrastructure according to the FAIR principles

Scholarly citations are bridges that enable people to track the evolution of scholarly disciplines and research topics and, when made available as open research information, are crucial for creating indicators supporting responsible research assessment exercises. Open citation data that is compliant with FAIR data principles benefits the scholarly community as a whole. Indeed, it is essential for citation indexes (either proprietary services or open science infrastructures) to embrace the FAIR principles to maximise their interoperability and reuse. Since 2010, the open science infrastructure organisation OpenCitations (https://opencitations.net) has provided access to global scholarly bibliographic and citation data as a disruptive alternative to traditional proprietary citation indexes. OpenCitations has pursued full compliance with the FAIR principles since the creation of its very first collection, the Open Citations Corpus (OCC). Indeed, as a founding member of the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC, https://i4oc.org), it has been commended that open citations should be structured, separable and open. OpenCitations' citation coverage is continuously growing, thanks to ingesting new raw citation data from different sources, including Crossref, DataCite, PubMed, OpenAIRE, and the Japan Link Center. The quantity and diversification of the ingested information made it necessary to design a new workflow to produce two comprehensive collections, OpenCitations Meta and OpenCitations Index, which currently contain almost 2 billion citation links. The new workflow, released in November 2023, implements the FAIR principles by design, aiming at improving their interoperability and reuse. With this poster, we will introduce how OpenCitations' data, services and workflows comply with FAIR principles, offering guidance for other open science infrastructures interested in addressing the same goals. Poster presented in the context of the EOSC Symposium 2024 (Berlin, 21-23 October 2024).