Purpose – The academic tradition of adding a reference section with references to cited and otherwise related academic material to an article provides a natural starting point for finding links to other publications. These links can then be published as linked data. Natural language processing technologies are available today that can perform the task of bibliographical reference extraction from text. Publishing references by the means of semantic web technologies is a prerequisite for a broader study and analysis of citations and thus can help to improve academic communication in a general sense. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This paper examines the overall workflow required to extract, analyze and semantically publish bibliographical references within an Institutional Repository with the help of open source software components. Findings – A publication infrastructure where references are available for software agents would enable additional benefits like citation analysis, e.g. the collection of citations of a known paper and the investigation of citation sentiment.The publication of reference information as demonstrated in this article is possible with existing semantic web technologies based on established ontologies and open source software components. Research limitations/implications – Only a limited number of metadata extraction programs have been considered for performance evaluation and reference extraction was tested for journal articles only, whereas Institutional Repositories usually do contain a large number of other material like monographs. Also, citation analysis is in an experimental state and citation sentiment is currently not published at all. For future work, the problem of distributing reference information between repositories is an important problem that needs to be tackled. Originality/value – Publishing reference information as linked data are new within the academic publishing domain.