Peroni and Shotton present OpenCitations as a direct infrastructural challenge to proprietary citation regimes, arguing that bibliographic citations—directional links through which scholarship acknowledges prior work—should be treated as open, reusable and machine-actionable public knowledge. The paper’s central intervention is both political and technical: citation data locked inside Web of Science, Scopus or similarly restricted platforms impede equitable access, reproducible bibliometrics and accountable research assessment, whereas OpenCitations publishes citation data as Linked Open Data using Semantic Web standards. Its case synthesis is embodied in COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, which the paper reports as containing over 445 million citations, alongside the OpenCitations Corpus, Open Citation Identifiers, SPAR ontologies, REST APIs, SPARQL endpoints and downloadable CC0 datasets. The diagram on page 9 clarifies the OpenCitations Data Model by showing how bibliographic resources, citations, identifiers, agents, roles and references are semantically interlinked; pages 15–17 then evidence community uptake through access statistics, a global usage map and Figshare download figures. The crucial conceptual move is to treat citations as first-class data entities, rather than mere links, thereby enabling provenance tracking, network analysis, reuse and verification. The conclusion is that open citation infrastructure does not simply improve discovery; it redistributes bibliometric power, making scholarly evaluation less dependent on opaque commercial indexes and more answerable to a global research commons.