The Integration of the Japan Link Center’s Bibliographic Data into OpenCitations: The production of bibliographic and citation data structured according to the OpenCitations Data Model, originating from an Anglo-Japanese dataset

In this article, we present OpenCitations’ main data collections: the unified index of citation data (OpenCitations Index), and the bibliographic data corpus (OpenCitations Meta) in view of the integration of a new dataset provided by the Japan Link Center (JaLC). Based on a computational analysis of the titles of the publications performed in October 2023, 8.6% of the bibliographic metadata stored in OpenCitations Meta are not in English. Nevertheless, the ingestion of an Anglo-Japanese dataset represents the first opportunity to test the soundness of a language-agnostic metadata crosswalk process for collecting data from multilingual sources, aiming to preserve bibliodiversity and to minimize information loss considering the constraints imposed by the OpenCitations data model, which does not allow the acceptance of multiple values in different translations for the same metadata field. The JaLC dataset is set to join OpenCitations’ collections in November 2023, and it will be made available in RDF, CSV, and SCHOLIX formats. Data will be produced using open-source software and provided under a CC0 license via API services, web browsing interfaces, Figshare data dumps, and SPARQL endpoints, ensuring high interoperability, reuse, and semantic exploitation.