“Despite being so crucial, citations — the pieces of metadata that serve as references to works — are often ignored in discussions of types of open knowledge. Historically, citations and their cross-references have been laboriously collected (by hand, then by computational techniques) in bibliographic indexes. These indexes, once published in serial print volumes, are today generally offered as web-based, paywalled subscription products by scholarly entities or for-profit companies. Indexing and abstracting services are big business: Web of Science, an academic journal and proceedings index that has existed since the 1960s, can cost subscribing libraries hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Web of Science is currently owned by Clarivate, which in 2020 had revenues of 1.2 billion USDundefined from its portfolio of analytics and intellectual property management tools that monetize the research process….”
Category Archives: oa.wikicite
The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing
“In recent years, there has been a push to openly license citation metadata to better enable large-scale analyses and discoverability of scholarly work. The “Initiative for Open Citations” (I4OC),undefined launched in 2017, has led the way in helping publishers share citations to their works under a public domain CC0 license. As of early 2021, over a billion citations from one scholarly article to another are collected in public domain databases, a major shift from just a few years earlier.undefined These open databases provide the backbone for new discovery tools, and are used by academics training artificial intelligence tools. Open corpora like the Microsoft Academic Graph are themselves widely cited.undefined However, Microsoft Academic Graph will be shuttered in 2021; despite their importance, new citation projects are reliant on continued funding and support by their host, and longevity is not always guaranteed….
Wikidata is a freely licensed and editable online database of linked data, with 94 million items as of June 2021.undefined Like its sister project Wikipedia, it has a vibrant multilingual volunteer community that develops and maintains it, and is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata also includes bibliographic metadata: as of June 2021, nearly 40 million items on Wikidata represented publications, accounting for 43% of all items.undefined These are a combination of semi-automated uploads of citations from other open databases, items about notable publications that have their own Wikipedia articles, and items added manually by editors. Wikidata is also attractive for libraries, archives, and cultural institutions that want to make their metadata more openly available and reusable, and there are several ongoing projects to incorporate Wikidata into library and archival cataloging processes and connect Wikidata to new open knowledgebases….”
The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing
“In recent years, there has been a push to openly license citation metadata to better enable large-scale analyses and discoverability of scholarly work. The “Initiative for Open Citations” (I4OC),undefined launched in 2017, has led the way in helping publishers share citations to their works under a public domain CC0 license. As of early 2021, over a billion citations from one scholarly article to another are collected in public domain databases, a major shift from just a few years earlier.undefined These open databases provide the backbone for new discovery tools, and are used by academics training artificial intelligence tools. Open corpora like the Microsoft Academic Graph are themselves widely cited.undefined However, Microsoft Academic Graph will be shuttered in 2021; despite their importance, new citation projects are reliant on continued funding and support by their host, and longevity is not always guaranteed….
Wikidata is a freely licensed and editable online database of linked data, with 94 million items as of June 2021.undefined Like its sister project Wikipedia, it has a vibrant multilingual volunteer community that develops and maintains it, and is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata also includes bibliographic metadata: as of June 2021, nearly 40 million items on Wikidata represented publications, accounting for 43% of all items.undefined These are a combination of semi-automated uploads of citations from other open databases, items about notable publications that have their own Wikipedia articles, and items added manually by editors. Wikidata is also attractive for libraries, archives, and cultural institutions that want to make their metadata more openly available and reusable, and there are several ongoing projects to incorporate Wikidata into library and archival cataloging processes and connect Wikidata to new open knowledgebases….”
WikiCite awards 23 grants & eScholarships to improve open citations – Diff
“Palm-leaf manuscripts from Bali; Legislation from Brazil; and Newspapers from Nigeria. These are just three of 23 groups and individuals across 15 countries which received WikiCite grants – the majority of which are outside the OECD. Project categories include: content creation & upload, outreach & training, software development, and documentation/localization. Combined these grants are valued at $69,000 USD, and we received more than double the number of excellent applications than the budget could support.
The WikiCite initiative focuses the development of open citations and linked bibliographic data to serve free knowledge and is itself supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation….”
WikiCite/2020 Virtual conference – Meta
“A Wikimedia initiative to develop open citations and linked bibliographic data to serve free knowledge. WikiCite is a series of conferences and workshops in support of that goal. The project is based in the Wikidata, which celebrates its 8th Birthday this year. As part of this year’s online conference, there are a series of sessions looking in depth at the WikiCite facets of Wikidata relating to citations, publications, authors, institutions, archives and related topics….”
Library Summer Project Attracts Grant Funding – Library News Online
“The Wikimedia Foundation has awarded Vanderbilt University a grant to advance WikiCite among information professionals. WikiCite is a “Wikimedia initiative to develop open citations and linked bibliographic data to serve free knowledge.” The grant will fund a training program titled “WikiCite for Librarians: Interactive Learning Pathways for Information Professionals.” The participants in this grant gained entering bibliographic data into Wikidata by way of their participation in our summer VandyCite team. This grant will permit them to consolidate what they learned and to share that knowledge with fellow information professionals. If you would like to read the grant in its entirely, please….”
Robustifying Scholia: paving the way for knowledge discovery and research assessment through Wikidata
Abstract: Knowledge workers like researchers, students, journalists, research evaluators or funders need tools to explore what is known, how it was discovered, who made which contributions, and where the scholarly record has gaps. Existing tools and services of this kind are not available as Linked Open Data, but Wikidata is. It has the technology, active contributor base, and content to build a large-scale knowledge graph for scholarship, also known as WikiCite. Scholia visualizes this graph in an exploratory interface with profiles and links to the literature. However, it is just a working prototype. This project aims to “robustify Scholia” with back-end development and testing based on pilot corpora. The main objective at this stage is to attain stability in challenging cases such as server throttling and handling of large or incomplete datasets. Further goals include integrating Scholia with data curation and manuscript writing workflows, serving more languages, generating usage stats, and documentation.