Explore Open Archives-Metalist | Evaluation | Tools and resources The Open Citation Project - Reference Linking and Citation Analysis for Open Archives

 

About the project

OpCit, a three year R&D project that began in October 1999 and completed at the end of 2002, was funded by the Joint NSF - JISC International Digital Libraries Research Programme ... funding organisations.
R&D centres: Southampton University (UK), Cornell University (USA) ... people

Where we finished This paper in D-Lib Magazine (October 2002) tells the OpCit story. For a quick overview see the slides from the project's presentation at the JISC/NSF Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) All Projects Meeting, Edinburgh, in June 2002. Final summary of the project, produced for JISC in December 2002 and required to be “suitable for general publication aimed at lay readers and describing the achievements made” in one page: The Open Citation Project: new momentum for open access Annual reports to funding agencies Final (Year 3) reports, to December 2002 Southampton: Final Report to JISC (pdf, 13 pp) Cornell: Final report to the NSF (8 pp, .doc format, pdf version) Second year reports, to September 2001 Southampton: formally submitted version (shorter, 5 pp) and more descriptive version (23 pp) (both in pdf) Cornell: formal version (6 pp, Postscript, pdf version) First year reports, up to September 2000, from Southampton (long) and from Cornell (short). Where we started. See the original project proposal, or edited extracts. For a quick overview see the slides from the project's presentation at the Digital Libraries Initiative All-Projects Meeting, Cornell University, October 1999 Our brief pre-launch announcement (May 1999): "In a three-way partnership, Southampton University, Cornell University, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory will hyperlink each of the over 100,000 papers in Los Alamos's unique online Physics Archive to every other paper in the archive that it cites. It is hoped that the power of this remarkable new way of navigating the scientific journal literature will help induce authors in others fields to join to create interlinked online archives like Los Alamos across disciplines and around the world."

Fast facts

• Prior related projects: The Open Journal Project (to 1998), Dienst, FEDORA
• Collaborating partners: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library; NEC Princeton; Openly Informatics, Inc. (USA); SLAC-SPIRES (USA); Highwire Press (USA); Queen Mary Westfield College, London; American Physical Society; California Digital Library; International DOI Foundation; Dublin Core Working Group on Bibliographic Citations; CrossRef, Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA); Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University; Loughborough University, Department of Information Science; BioMed Central (UK) ... collaborating people.
  Services from our partners
• Associated organisations: Association for Computing Machinery ... more details

Deliverables

• Scale: to attempt to hyperlink each of the over 200,000 papers in Los Alamos's unique online Physics Archive to every other paper in the archive that it cites
  Delivered: Citebase, citation-ranked search
• Interoperability: to develop and integrate a family of generic linking tools and to design author and user interfaces to enable easy adoption by other archives, services and publishers
  Delivered: Reference linking API; GNU EPrints.
• Universality: to promote the power of this new way of navigating the scientific journal literature and induce authors in other fields to create interlinked online archives like Los Alamos across disciplines and around the world
  Delivered: Papers and presentations; American Scientist Forum

What next?

Donna Bergmark, Cornell partner, is building on her reference linking ideas in pioneering and award-winning new work on Collection Synthesis.

Led by Carl Lagoze, there will be exciting opportunities for OAI to be taken forward in the US National Science Digital Library (NSDL) programme.

The work of OpCit will be taken forward not just in the obvious products of the project, such as Citebase and GNU EPrints, but in new environments as well, specifically, projects in the the JISC FAIR programme:

• E-Prints UK, Resource Discovery Network, King's College London, plans to use Citebase software and citation data from Citebase to enhance its database for discovery of eprint papers available from Open Archives hosted at UK universities and colleges.
• SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access), lead institution: Nottingham University, will build EPrints-based archives at six major UK universities, using this experience to report on the implications for management and quality control of such archives.
• TARDIS (Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and dISclosure), Southampton University, will investigate strategies 'to overcome the technical, cultural and academic barriers', which might be found to be restricting the development of institutional eprint archives, by developing a working model of a multidisciplinary institutional archive based on EPrints.
• RoMEO (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving), Loughborough University, will canvas users to identify (mis)perceptions about how rights should be formulated and protected for 'give away' works — "texts from which the author does not seek sales revenue" — promoting practical approaches that can "assigned, disclosed, harvested, and displayed" via the OAI-PMH.

Keywords: digital libraries, open archives, eprint archives, reference linking, citation analysis