Open citations movement and its role in the transformation of research evaluation El movimiento open citations y sus implicaciones en la transformación de la evaluación científica

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to review the emerging Open Citations movement, which advocates for the free dissemination of bibliographic citations included in research publications. This movement, framed within the broader mainstream currents of Open Data and Open Access, thus attempts for bibliographic citations to be a common good for the scholarly community, reinforcing bibliometric research and the building of internal scientific information systems. This change is causing a revolution in the scientific information market, as new products and platforms are arising that make it possible to evaluate the production and impact of researchers and organizations using open and alternative sources. This transformation is an opportunity to develop institutional or national portals that, fed by these open sources, permit their own and independent evaluation. The paper begins with an introduction about the origin and context of this movement; then, the extraction and process of citations are explained; next, several sources of open citation data are described (Crossref, Microsoft Academic Knowledge Graph, OpenCitation Corpus) and some alternative products (Lens, Dimensions, SemanticScholar); finally, the implications this movement can have on scientific evaluation is analysed, highlighting the possibility of developing local Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) intended for scientific evaluation.