– Citation data needs to be recognised as a part of the Commons – those works that are freely and legally available for sharing – and placed in an open repository. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
– The Open Citation Corpus is a new open repository of scholarly citation data, made available under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 public domain dedication and encoded as Open Linked Data using the SPAR Ontologies.
– The Open Citation Corpus presently provides open access (OA) to reference lists from 204,637 articles from the OA Subset of PubMed Central, containing 6,325,178 individual references to 3,373,961 unique papers.
– Scholars, publishers and institutions may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the open citation data for any purpose, without restriction under copyright or database law.
