Author: Jason

How you can help keep OpenAlex free

Next month, we’re submitting a renewal application for our main grant. This grant helps keep OpenAlex free to you. We need your help to get the renewal. There are two ways to help:

  1. Write a short testimonial 
  2. Subscribe to our Premium service

Details below:

1. Testimonial

We need to show our funder that we’re making a real and necessary impact. Testimonials are amazing for that. Could you write us a quick testimonial? We need 5-7 sentences that answer these questions:

  • Who are you?
  • What problem is OpenAlex solving for you?
  • How did you solve it before us?
  • Why is OpenAlex a better solution?
  • What’s a concrete good outcome of using OpenAlex?
  • Would you recommend OpenAlex to others?

Here’s an (imaginary) example:

CatCademia connects academic researchers to share research ideas and cat pictures. For this we need publication lists for all users. Originally, users had to curate their own lists, which was a big pain point. Now we use OpenAlex’s open API to auto-generate users’ publication lists at signup. Upon launching this feature, we saw an immediate increase in user retention and cat-picture sharing. We highly recommend OpenAlex to anyone who needs high-quality, open scholarly data.

You can submit your testimonial here. Thanks!

2. Premium

We recently launched a paid upgrade to our service called OpenAlex Premium. Premium offers:

  • Faster updates, so you can get fresher data,
  • Higher API limits, so you can use the API more, and
  • Priority support for faster and more detailed help.

Our funder (correctly, imho) wants to see we’re on the road to self-sustainability. So, we’re asking you to take a look at Premium and see if it’s something that would help you. 

If not, no worries–we’re delighted to make most of what we do free, and we want users to enjoy that. But if it looks useful, please get in touch ASAP! We’re offering hefty early-adopter discounts to folks that sign up this month.

Thanks very much for your time and support!

Best,

The OpenAlex Team

New OpenAlex API features!

We’ve got a ton of great API improvements to report! If you’re an API user, there’s a good chance there’s something in here you’re gonna love.

Search

You can now search both titles and abstracts. We’ve also implemented stemming, so a search for “frogs” now automatically gets your results mentioning “frog,” too. Thanks to these changes, searches for works now deliver around 10x more results. This can all be accessed using the new search query parameter.

New entity filters

We’ve added support for tons of new filters, which are documented here. You can now:

  • get all of a work’s outgoing citations (ie, its references section) with a single query. 
  • search within each work’s raw affiliation data to find an arbitrary string (eg a specific department within an organization)
  • filter on whether or not an entity has a canonical external ID (works: has_doi, authors: has_orcid, etc)

Request multiple records by ID at once

This has been our most-requested feature and we’re super excited to roll it out! By using the new OR operator, you can request up to 50 entities in a single API call. You can use any ID we support–DOI, ISSN, OpenAlex ID, etc.

Deep paging

Using cursor-based paging, you can now retrieve an infinite number of results (it used to be just the top 10,000). But remember: if you want to download the entire dataset, please use the snapshot, not the API! The snapshot is the exact same data in the exact same format, but much much faster and cheaper for you and us.

More groups in group_by queries

We now return the top 200 groups (it used to be just the top 50).

New Autocomplete endpoint

Our new autocomplete endpoint dead easy to use our data to power an autocomplete/typeahead widget in your own projects. It works for any of our five entity types (works, authors, venues, institutions, or concepts). If you’ve got users inputting the names of journals, institutions, or other entities, now you can easily let them choose an entity instead of entering free text–and then you can store the ID (ISSN, ROR, whatever) instead of passing strings around everywhere. 

Better docs

In addition to documenting the new features above, we’ve also added lots of new documentation for existing features, addressing our most frequent questions and requests:

Thanks to everyone who’s been in touch to ask for new features, report bugs, and tell us where we can improve (also where we’re doing well, we’re ok with that too).
We’ll continue improving the API and the docs. We’re also putting tons of work into improving the underlying dataset’s accuracy and coverage, and we’re happy to report that we’ve improved a lot on what we inherited from MAG, with more improvements to come. We’ve delayed the launch of the full web UI, but expect that in the summer…we are so excited about all the possibilities that’s going to open up.

MAG replacement update: meet OpenAlex!

Last month, we announced that we’re launching a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) this December–just before MAG itself will be discontinued.  We’ve heard from a lot of current MAG users since then. All of them have offered their support and encouragement (which we really appreciate), and all have also all been curious to learn more. So: here’s more! It’s a snapshot of what we know right now.  As the project progresses, we’ll have more details to share, keeping everyone as up-to-date as we can.

Name

We’ve now got a name for this project: OpenAlex. We like that it (a) emphasizes Open, and (b) is inspired by the ancient Library of Alexandria — like that fabled institution, OpenAlex will strive to create a comprehensive map of the global scholarly conversation. We’ll start with MAG data, and we’ll expand over time. Along with the name, we’ve got the beginnings of a webpage at openalex.org, and a Twitter account at @OpenAlex_org.

Mailing list

We’ve now got a mailing list where you can sign up for more announcements as they happen. You can sign up for the mailing list on the new OpenAlex homepage.

Funding

Our nonprofit OurResearch recently received a $4.5 million grant from the Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. This grant has been in the works for some time, and is a big part of why we felt confident in announcing OpenAlex when we did. In the proposal, there was already a plan for a project similar to OpenAlex, so we were able to quickly pivot the grant details to direct about a million dollars to the development of OpenAlex. 

It’s a three year grant, which will give us plenty of time to develop and launch OpenAlex, as well as test and launch a long-term revenue. This model will not be built on selling data (see Openness below), but rather based on selling value-added services and service level agreements. We’ve got experience with this approach: we’re funding Unpaywall this way, and it’s been both open and fully self-sustaining for several years now.

Openness

We’re passionate about openness. It’s the “Our” in our name–we think research should belong to all of us, as humans.  Openness is the first of core values, and it’s a big piece of our recent public commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). A lot of our excitement about OpenAlex comes from the chance to make this rich dataset unprecedentedly open.  Specifically:

  • The code will be open source under an MIT license, hosted on our GitHub account and backed up by Software Heritage.
  • The data will be as openly licensed as possible. Some of the data consists of facts, which have no copyright (see this Crossref post for more about that idea). Where copyright is applicable, and where we have the option, we’ll apply the CC0 waiver. Where other rightsholders are involved, we will encourage them to allow a similarly open license.
  • The data will be free, as in no cost. It will be available via a free API (more details below) with generous limits, as well as periodic data dumps available at no charge (we may require the downloader to cover the 3rd party data transfer fees if these get heavy).

Data we are losing (at least to start)

As mentioned in our initial announcement, OpenAlex will be missing some data that MAG currently has–particularly at our launch in 2021, due to the very tight timeline. More accurately, we’ll have this data, but won’t be keeping it up to date. Specifically we won’t have: 

  • Conference Series and Conference Instances. Importantly, we’ll continue to bring in the vast majority of conference papers. But won’t be keeping track of  new conferences themselves (eg, The 34th Annual Conference of Foo), and with that the ability to link conference papers to those conferences.
  • Citation Contexts (the full text of the paragraph where each citation originally appeared)
  • Most abstracts. We will however probably have those (minority of) abstracts that publishers send Crossref or PubMed for redistribution.
  • Full coverage of DOI-unassigned works:. MAG is particularly good at finding scholarly papers without a DOI. We’ll be less good, especially at first. We will include many DOI-unassigned works…just not as many as MAG.

There is some other data that may or may not make it into OpenAlex by December 2021. We are still testing these for feasibility:

  • Patents
  • Paper recommendations

Data we are adding

Although we’ll be missing some data, we’ll also be bringing some new data to the party — stuff MAG doesn’t have right now. Specifically will include:

  • The Open Access status of papers (via the Unpaywall dataset, which has become the industry standard). We’ll be able to tell you whether a given paper is OA or not, its copyright license, and where to find it. 
  • A more comprehensive list of ISSNs associated with each journal, including the ISSN-L, which is helpful for deduplicating journals.
  • ORCID for author clusters. To start with, this will just be in unambiguous cases, when assignment is clear via the Crossref and ORCID datasets. Over time we may apply fancier, more inferential assignments.
  • ROR IDs for institutions, in addition to GRIDs

Over the long term, our goal with OpenAlex is to create a truly comprehensive map of the global scholarly conversation, so we’ll be continually looking to  expand and enhance the data it includes.

Data dumps

There will be (at least) two ways to get at the data: data dumps, and the API (below). 

Data dumps will be in the same table/column format as the MAG data, so that the downloads can be a drop-in replacement. There may be some additional tables and additional columns for new data we’re adding, and some data values will be missing (both of these are described above), but if you’re running code to ingest MAG dumps right now, you’ll be able to run pretty much the same code to ingest OpenAlex dumps in December. That’s a really important part of this project for us, because we know it will save a lot of folks a lot of time.

We will release new data dumps every 2 weeks, as either a full dump or an incremental update or both (we’re still looking into that). The data will likely be hosted on AWS S3 rather than Microsoft Azure.

API 

The other way main to get at the data will be via the API. Here we will be doing it pretty differently than Microsoft. We will not be supporting the Microsoft Academic Knowledge API or Microsoft Academic Knowledge Exploration Service (MAKES). Instead, we will host a central, open REST API that anyone can query. This API will have two kinds of endpoints: entity endpoints, and slice-and-dice endpoints. Both will be read-only (GET), deliver data in JSON format, and be rate-limited but with high rate-limits. 

  • Entity endpoints will let you quickly retrieve a specific scholarly entity (eg paper, person, journal, etc) by its ID. Signatures will look like  /doi/:doi and /journal/:issn.
  • Slice-and-dice endpoints will let you query the data with filters to return either item lists, or aggregate group counts. An example call might look something like /query?filter=issn:2167-8359,license:cc-by&groupby=year (that would give you the annual counts of CC-BY-licensed articles from the journal PeerJ). You could also use the slice-and-dice endpoints to do things like build a faceted scholarly search engine, or an evaluation tool.

Timeline

We appreciate that having a scheduled beta (or alpha!) release of the API and data dump would be very helpful. And we further realize that the sooner we can let you know that schedule, the better. Unfortunately, we don’t know the timeline for these releases yet. Our current best guess is the early fall. We’ll certainly be doing our best to get something pushed out there as soon as possible. We encourage you to  join the mailing list so we can keep you up to date. 

Your comments

Finally, we welcome your comments and questions! We’ve gotten oodles of helpful feedback already, and we really appreciate that. We’re especially interested in getting your current use-case for MAG…we’re working to prioritize supporting those cases, first and foremost.  You can do that via our community survey here, or drop us a line at team@ourresearch.org.

Open Science nonprofit OurResearch receives $4.5M grant from Arcadia Fund

OurResearch, a nonprofit seeking to speed the global adoption of Open Science, announced today that it had been awarded a new 3-year, $4.5M (USD) grant from the UK-based Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

The grant, which follows an 2018 award for $850,000, will help expand two existing open-source software projects, as well as support the launch of two new ones:

  • Unpaywall, launched in 2017, has become the world’s most-used index of Open Access (OA) scholarly papers. The free Unpaywall extension has 400,000 active users, and its underlying database powers OA-related features in dozens of other tools including Web of Science, Scopus, and the European Open Science Monitor. All Unpaywall data is free and open.
  • Unsub is an analytics dashboard that helps academic libraries cancel their large journal subscriptions, freeing up money for OA publishing. Launched in late 2019, Unsub is now used by over 500 major libraries in the US and worldwide, including the national library consortia of Canada, Australia, Greece, Hong Kong, and the UK. 
  • JournalsDB will be a free and open database of scholarly journals. This resource will gather a wide range of data on tens of thousands of journals, emphasizing coverage of emerging open venues. 
  • OpenAlex will be a free and open bibliographic database, cataloging papers, authors, affiliations, citations, and journals. Inspired by the ancient Library of Alexandria, OpenAlex will strive to create a comprehensive map of the global scholarly conversation.  In a recent blog post, the team announced that OpenAlex will be released in time to serve as a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph, whose discontinuation was also recently announced.

OurResearch’s ongoing operations costs (about $1M annually) are currently covered by earned revenue from service-level agreements. The new funding will go toward accelerating development of new features and tools.

The new tools and features will be developed in keeping with OurResearch’s longstanding commitment to openness. OurResearch recently became one of the first to commit to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), a set of guidelines encouraging openness, sustainability, and responsive governance. OurResearch has always fully shared its source code and datasets, and maintains a transparency webpage publishing salaries, tax filings, and other information. The proposal for this grant is itself shared on Open Grants.

“We are very grateful to the Arcadia Foundation for this grant, which will help us innovate more quickly than ever before. There is an urgent need for open scholarly infrastructure,” said Heather Piwowar, one of OurResearch’s two cofounders. 

“Since our beginning at a hackathon ten years ago, we’ve been working to build sustainable, open, community-oriented software tools to make research more open,” added her cofounder Jason Priem. “We’re so excited about the ways this grant will help us further that vision.” 

Work on the grant is expected to begin at once, with early versions of both JournalsDB and the OpenAlex launching later this year.

———————————-

OurResearch is a nonprofit that builds tools to help accelerate the transition to universal Open Science. Started at a hackathon in 2011, they remain committed to creating open, sustainable research infrastructure that solves real-world problems.

Arcadia is a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. It supports charities and scholarly institutions that preserve cultural heritage and the environment. Arcadia also supports projects that promote open access and all of its awards are granted on the condition that any materials produced are made available for free online. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $777 million to projects around the world.

OurResearch’s Commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure

OurResearch is committed to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). This post summarizes how we are honoring these principles, as well as where we still have work left to do.

Since our beginning in an all-night hackathon ten years ago, we’ve tried to run OurResearch as a sustainable, open, and community-aligned provider of scholarly infrastructure. So while we didn’t write the POSI principles, we sure do recognize them: by and large, these are principles we’ve held (and argued for) from the beginning (eg: 2012, 2018). They’re consistent with our core values of openness, progress, pragmatism, sustainability, and community. 

So when someone asked us recently if we endorse POSI, our answer was HECK YEAH! Today, we’d like to follow that up with a more concrete, public, and formal commitment to these principles. This commitment has been unanimously approved by our board of directors.

The sixteen POSI principles are divided into three sections: Insurance, Governance, and Sustainability. We’ve arranged the document below in the same way. For each principle, we begin with a short description (in italics), taken from the original POSI paper.

If an item has a green heart 💚, we think we’re doing a decent job of it. But that doesn’t mean we’re doing a perfect job. We’re not. We’re committed to continual improvement, and continual vigilance to make sure we honor our commitments. If there’s a yellow heart 💛, we think we’re making progress, but still have a ways to go. We’ll be continuing to work on it. That may take us a while; this is a journey. But we’ll get there.

Finally: our thanks to Geoff Bilder, Jennifer Lin, and Cameron Neylon for authoring the principles, and thanks to Crossref, Dryad, ROR, and JOSS for their early POSI commitments, which gave us great examples to follow.

Summary

Insurance
💚 Open source
💚 Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)
💚 Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
💚 Patent non-assertion

Governance
💚 Coverage across the research enterprise
💛 Stakeholder Governed
💛 Non-discriminatory membership
💚 Transparent operations
💚 Cannot lobby
💚 Living will
💚 Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down

Sustainability
💚 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
💚 Goal to generate surplus
💚 Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months
💚 Mission-consistent revenue generation
💚 Revenue based on services, not data

(💚 = good, 💛 = less good)

Insurance

💚 Open source

All software required to run the infrastructure should be available under an open source license. This does not include other software that may be involved with running the organisation.

All the source code behind everything we do is freely available on GitHub under the MIT open source license. This includes our products, websites, and the software behind the papers we publish. Our code is “born open” — we write it in the open, rather than periodically posting a cleaned-up “open version” later on. Source code is archived via Software Heritage, ensuring availability over the long haul.

💚 Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)

For an infrastructure to be forked it will be necessary to replicate all relevant data. The CC0 waiver is best practice in making data legally available. Privacy and data protection laws will limit the extent to which this is possible

OurResearch makes the data behind our projects open. For example, you can download a full dump of the Unpaywall database, all 120M+ rows of it, any time. This data dump is updated at least once a year. That same data is also available via a public, open API with generous rate limits (100,000 calls per day). Past projects (Impactstory Profiles, Depsy, Paperbuzz, etc) have also always had an open API, and we commit to similar approaches for future products.

Sometimes users share their private data with us, so that we can use that data to generate reports and analyses for them. For example, Unsub users upload their COUNTER data and price lists in order to inform an analytics dashboard we make for them. We never share that private data, or the data derived from it. However, we do encourage users to share their own data, and we never restrict our users’ right to access and share any data they get from us. 

Some of our data, like Crossref’s, consists of facts that have no copyright. Where copyright is applicable, our data is licensed as CC0.

💚 Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)

It is not enough that the data be made “open” if there is not a practical way to actually obtain it. Underlying data should be made easily available via periodic data dumps.

As described above, OurResearch is committed to providing practical ways to obtain open data. 

💚 Patent non-assertion

The organisation should commit to a patent non-assertion covenant. The organisation may obtain patents to protect its own operations, but not use them to prevent the community from replicating the infrastructure.

OurResearch believes patents do not belong in scholarly infrastructure. We will not pursue or assert patents. We will look into making a formal patent non-assertion covenant as suggested by Crossref.

Governance

💚 Coverage across the research enterprise

It is increasingly clear that research transcends disciplines, geography, institutions and stakeholders. The infrastructure that supports it needs to do the same.

We are committed to serving a diverse group of stakeholders across the research enterprise:

  • Disciplines: our products cover the gamut of scholarly disciplines, including STEM, humanities, social sciences, and professional education.
  • Geography: Our users are worldwide, on all continents (except Antarctica…we’re working on that one) and in nearly every country. We take care to support papers and other works written in all languages.
  • Institutions and stakeholders: we serve all different kinds of institutions and stakeholders. Unsub users, for example, include not just the world’s largest research universities, but also industry labs, nonprofits, museums, community colleges, and philanthropies. Unpaywall is used by all of the above, as well as by academic publishers, library services companies (large and small), bibliometricians, research assessment exercises, and startups. The free Unpaywall extension currently has 400,000 active users, including large numbers of students, journalists, policy-makers, independent researchers, laypeople, and other historically neglected stakeholder groups.

By offering different types of products, aimed at different sets of stakeholders, we’re able to engage with a wide range of communities, and hear how their needs are similar, and how they’re different. We build infrastructure that cuts across communities where applicable–for instance, the open Unpaywall dataset is used in all kinds of ways. However, we also find places where a particular group would benefit from more customized tooling. For example, we built the Simple Query Tool (a web-based UI to Unpaywall) in response to requests from less technical users who wanted to access the database, but didn’t feel comfortable using a REST API. Later we built an Unpaywall repository dashboard for institutional repository librarians, a stakeholder group we didn’t originally consider.

Although we do strive to be inclusive, there are areas where we can continue to improve, and we intend to do so. For example, we’d like to improve our internationalization, by writing more documentation and UI components in languages besides English. In the next year we will be making an important stride to support diversity, as we provide better support for research works not assigned a DOI. 

💛 Stakeholder Governed

A board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds more confidence that the organisation will take decisions driven by community consensus and consideration of different interests.

OurResearch is a 501(c)3 organization, with a governance structure documented in its bylaws. Our Board of Directors, being a small group, is limited in its representation, in terms of geographic, ethnic, gender, disability, and organizational diversity. The current board includes those with work experience as a faculty member, publisher, library advocate, teacher, and infrastructure builder, with educational backgrounds in science, engineering, history, and business. While this does represent many aspects of our stakeholder community, the small size of our board limits the extent to which the range of stakeholders can be involved. We recognize that increasing the diversity of stakeholders on our Board is important to provide diverse perspectives. We will work towards improving this.

💛 Non-discriminatory membership

We see the best option as an “opt-in” approach with a principle of non-discrimination where any stakeholder group may express an interest and should be welcome. The process of representation in day to day governance must also be inclusive with governance that reflects the demographics of the membership.

OurResearch is not a membership based organization, but we fully support the principle of non-discrimination in our hiring, Board appointments, community engagement, outreach and all other activities. We engage our community through GitHub, Twitter, our mailing lists, and conferences (virtual and in-person), and welcome “opt-in” ideas from anyone at any time. We will also be launching an advisory group, to broaden the involvement of stakeholder groups as members of the community. 

We do not currently have a formal Code Of Conduct to govern interactions between OurResearch employees and Board members and the OurResearch community. We are working on one.

Representation in day-to-day governance comes from our employees, Board of Directors, customer feedback, and engagement with the community online. However, because our Board is 50% women, 50% men, entirely white, non-disabled, and based solely in the USA and Canada, it does not fully reflect the demographics of our community of users, which is global in scope and more racially, ethnically, and gender, disability, and geographically diverse than our current board. We will work towards improving this.

💚 Transparent operations

Achieving trust in the selection of representatives to governance groups will be best achieved through transparent processes and operations in general (within the constraints of privacy laws).

OurResearch strives to be a transparent organization.  As a 501(c)3 nonprofit, all of our tax returns are publicly available; you can find links to these on our transparency page. That page also publishes executive salaries, incorporation documents, bylaws, and other relevant information.  All our grant proposals (funded and unfunded) are openly published and archived on Open Grants (search under “Piwowar” or “Priem”). 

💚 Cannot lobby

The community, not infrastructure organisations, should collectively drive regulatory change. An infrastructure organisation’s role is to provide a base for others to work on and should depend on its community to support the creation of a legislative environment that affects it.

OurResearch is a mission-driven organization that works toward accelerating the transition to open science. We’re not lobbyists and we don’t lobby. As a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, we strictly adhere to U.S. limitations in this area.

💚  Living will

A powerful way to create trust is to publicly describe a plan addressing the condition under which an organisation would be wound down, how this would happen, and how any ongoing assets could be archived and preserved when passed to a successor organisation. Any such organisation would need to honour this same set of principles.

Our core assets are our source code and datasets. These are both open. Software is archived via Software Heritage assuring long-term persistence. Key datasets are integrated into other open datasets (eg, Unpaywall is part of the open DOIBoost dataset).  Today and in the future, our data and code can be used by a wide variety of successor organizations. 

We are a non-profit company without equity shares, so are unlikely to be bought or acquired.  That said, we are looking into formal mechanisms to codify that any future disposal of our brand assets (trademarks, domain names, etc) could only be to organizations who honour the same principles.

💚 Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down

Infrastructures exist for a specific purpose and that purpose can be radically simplified or even rendered unnecessary by technological or social change. If it is possible the organisation (and staff) should have direct incentives to deliver on the mission and wind down.

Many of the tools that OurResearch provides are “stop-gap” solutions. For example, in a world where all articles are open access at the time of publication, no open-access index like Unpaywall would be needed — the DOI would simply resolve to an open copy of the paper every time. Similarly, in a world without toll-access academic journals there is no longer a need for tools like Unsub to help librarians assess the value of journal subscriptions. 

We eagerly look forward to the day when our stop-gaps are no longer needed! We also plan accordingly, and will wind down projects (or parts of projects) as they are no longer valuable to the community. We don’t have formal incentives for this, other than looking forward to a really big party.

Sustainability

💚 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities

Day to day operations should be supported by day to day sustainable revenue sources. Grant dependency for funding operations makes them fragile and more easily distracted from building core infrastructure.

Currently earned revenue fully covers the day-to-day operations of OurResearch. When we get grants, we use them to support the development and early stages of new products, or to fund one-time enhancements of existing products. We will continue to work hard to ensure this remains true in the future.

💚 Goal to generate surplus

Organisations which define sustainability based merely on recovering costs are brittle and stagnant. It is not enough to merely survive, it has to be able to adapt and change. To weather economic, social and technological volatility, they need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs.

OurResearch currently has an operating surplus. This hasn’t always been true — we’ve had some lean years in the past — but it is certainly our goal to maintain a surplus in the future. Our deliberate decision to run with a relatively small number of staff makes it easier to achieve that goal. Our experience running in both rich and lean times over the last ten years makes us resilient to a wide range of financial contingencies. 

💚 Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months

A high priority should be generating a contingency fund that can support a complete, orderly wind down (12 months in most cases). This fund should be separate from those allocated to covering operating risk and investment in development.

We currently have funds available to support our operations for 12 months. We have not formally set these aside as a contingency fund. We will create a Use Of Funds policy to make our contingency and wind-down funds more explicit.

💚 Mission-consistent revenue generation

Potential revenue sources should be considered for consistency with the organisational mission and not run counter to the aims of the organisation. For instance…

The earned revenue of OurResearch currently comes from service level agreements to the Unpaywall Data Feed and subscriptions to Unsub custom analytics services. Our revenue comes from a worldwide assortment of universities, university consortia, scholarly publishers, discovery services, and research analytics companies. We supplement our earned revenue with grants from mission-aligned organizations like the Arcadia Foundation.

💚 Revenue based on services, not data

Data related to the running of the research enterprise should be a community property. Appropriate revenue sources might include value-added services, consulting, API Service Level Agreements or membership fees.

OurResearch receives no revenue for its data, which is completely open, but rather for service level agreements and value-added services. We’re deeply committed to maintaining this model. 

Our Research is now OurResearch

We love our name, but in the last few years we’ve found that it’s a bit confusing. In a lot of contexts, it’s not totally clear whether you’re talking about “Our Research” (the enthusiastic Open Science nonprofit) or “our research” (some research that belongs to some people, some of whom are us). That’s bad.

So, we’re changing the name. Or more accurately, we’re changing the spelling, by getting rid of the space. Our Research is now OurResearch! We’ve updated the spelling in all the places we could think of; this includes modifying our logo (hi-res version here):

If you find outdated usages we missed, please let us know. Also, if you’re using the old spelling or logo anywhere, we’d be thankful if you could change it to the new one, when it’s convenient. 

Thanks for reading, and thanks for your support! We’ll let Drake handle the outro:

We’re building a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph

Edit 15 June: Read our latest update on OpenAlex (this tool’s new name) here, and sign up for our mailing list here to get new updates as they happen.

This week Microsoft Research announced that their free bibliographic database–Microsoft Academic Graph, or MAG for short–is being discontinued. This is sad news, because MAG was a great source of open scholcomm metadata, including citation counts and author affiliations. MAG data is used in Unsub, as well as several other well-known open science tools.

Thankfully, we’ve got a contingency plan for this situation, which we’ve been working on for a while now. We’re building a successor to MAG. Like all our projects, it’ll be open-source and the data will be free to everyone via data dump and API. It will launch at the end of the year, when MAG is scheduled to disappear.

It’s important to note that this new service will not be a perfect replacement, especially right when it launches. MAG has excellent support for conference proceedings, for example; we won’t match that for a while, if ever.  Instead, we’ll be focusing on supporting the most important use-cases, and building out from there. If you use MAG today, we’d love to hear what your key use-cases are, so we can prioritize accordingly. Here’s where you can tell us.

We plan to have this launched by the time MAG disappears at year’s end. That’s an aggressive schedule, but we’ve built and launched other large projects (Unpaywall, Unsub) in less time. We’ve also got a good head start, since we’ve been working toward this as an internal project for a while now.

We’d love to hear ideas and feedback from the community…drop us a line on Twitter (@our_research) or via email (team@ourresearch.org)!

PS Many thanks to the team behind MAG, who built a really cool thing and made the data free and open. Respect.

Unsub pricing update

We’re rolling out a new pricing structure for Unsub, designed to be more fair to smaller institutions, and more streamlined for consortia.

New institution pricing

In the eight months since we released Unsub, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from folks concerned that our flat-rate pricing placed an unfair burden on smaller institutions. Big university libraries often manage budgets a hundred times larger than those of small college libraries; charging them both the same price feels inequitable to many.

We have come to agree–even before accounting for the fact that COVID seems poised to hit smaller colleges particularly hard. We want to build a fair, sustainable community around Unsub, and so we’re changing our flat-rate model to one where price is tied to institutional budgets.

Here’s the new pricing table: 

In this model, Unsub is cutting prices for most institutions; well over half of our prospective users fall into the new $500 tier. The richest schools, on the other hand, will pay more–but still less than they’d pay for comparable tools (specifically, the 1figr data report, which was around $15,000 for large universities, before Elsevier bought and discontinued it).

And even at the highest tier, we believe Unsub offers an unbeatable value for users. As Science recently reported “[Unsub] is saving universities millions of dollars in journal subscriptions.” We think–and are hearing from users–that $3,000 is a bargain, given this upside.

Based on our best growth projections, this will be a roughly revenue-neutral change for us. That is, we don’t expect to make (or lose) much money on the new prices; cuts at the bottom will be offset by the increase at the top. Our goal is to distribute the support burden more equitably. 

We put a lot of time into figuring out the correct pricing levels, and we had a lot of help. We’d like to thank the SPARC team, who provided helpful consulting, advice, and support. We’d also like to thank the folks who responded to our pricing survey, and the IPEDS database, all of which provided essential data. Of course we didn’t follow all of everyone’s advice, so we’ve erred, it’s our fault, not theirs!

The new prices will be effective immediately (4 August, 2020). If you are in the middle of getting the old price approved, that’s ok; just let us know and we’ll make an extension for you. 

If you’re already a customer, your next renewal will be at your current price (or the new price, whichever is lower). After that, you’ll get bumped up to the standard pricing (if that’s relevant for you; again, most universities will see the price drop or stay the same). So for example, if you’re a library with a $3M materials budget, and you subscribed in June 2020: when you renew in June 2021, you’ll pay the same $1,000 you paid to sign up, but in June 2022 you’ll get bumped up to $3,000.

As before, if you’re truly unable to afford the tool, get in touch, and we’ll do our best to work something out. It’s important to us that Unsub stays sustainable, but it’s also important to us that the barrier to entry is as low as possible. Our number one priority is the mission.

New consortium pricing

Our old consortium price deal was that if you could get 10 or more institutions to sign up together, we’d give you 20% off. 

This has turned out to be a bad fit for many consortia, because they want to do more of a rolling admissions system: they’ve got five institutions now, and expect another 20 to gradually sign up, one by one, over the course of the next year.

So, we’re modifying how the consortial discount works. It’s now a 10% discount, and there’s no minimum number of institutions needed to qualify. You just have to be getting Unsub through a consortium. Member institutions can sign up whenever they want, and we’ll bill the consortium right then (applying their 10% discount), and set up the new institution right away.

OK, that’s the news! We’re excited about these changes, because we think they’ll help us keep building the Unusb community in fair and sustainable ways. We really appreciate all the folks who gave us feedback. Keep it coming! We are learning a ton from our community and will keep making changes as we learn more and more.

Name change: Unpaywall Journals is now Unsub

As of today, Unpaywall Journals is now called: Unsub! That’s the only change–all the functionality is still the same, and of course it’s still the same Our Research team behind it.

Why the change? Two reasons:

1. We added data beyond Unpaywall. We started this project with a modest goal: a journal-level analysis of Open Access rates, using data from our free Unpaywall database. So, Unpaywall Journals was a natural name.

However, as we talked to early users, we learned that understanding OA in isolation wasn’t that helpful. Users wanted OA data, yes, but they wanted it in the broader context of a decision support tool. That required us adding a lot of new data and forecasting features. Unpaywall become just one data source of many.

2. We focused on supporting unsubscription. Early users helped us understand, they are not exploring the data for fun. They’re making Big Decisions about keeping or cancelling their Big Deals. These Big Deals have been leaking value for years, even as prices keep going up. As the inevitable cuts are made this year, Big Deals are an attractive target.

But users emphasized that they needed better data to understand their alternatives to the Big Deal, and how cancellations would affect campus access. As we worked to supply this data, Unpaywall Journals evolved into an increasingly focused tool, one built to help libraries unsubscribe with confidence.

So: time for a new name! One that reflects these two changes.

The result: Unsub! A tool to help librarians forecast, explore, and optimize their alternatives to the Big Deal. We hope you like it!

Welcome to our newest team member!

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added a new full-time employee to Impactstory. Richard Orr has joined us as the lead developer on Unpaywall. He’s fantastic, and has already made a big impact in the stability, performance, and feature set of Unpaywall–as well as massively improving the speed at which we address bugs. We are so excited about how much we’re going to be able to achieve now that Richard is on board!

He looks like this

By way of introduction, here’s a quick interview we did with Richard:

What drew you to this job?
The opportunity to contribute to science and make the world better. I’ve never had the required focus to become an expert in one field and make a big contribution in one area, so the chance to help everyone and make a small contribution in a lot of different areas was very appealing.

What will you be working on?
I’ll be working on Unpaywall, making it find more open access articles more accurately. I’ll also be making it work with other projects we have planned that will go beyond indexing articles by DOI and help you discover research in other ways.

What’s a time you’ve tried to find free-to-read scholarly literature for your own use?
Reading actual reviewed computer science papers has been extremely helpful in personal projects involving GPU computing. As a non-researcher it’s easy to forget that not everything is on Stack Overflow. With medical issues, I like to read relevant research myself so I know what questions to ask to make the best use of time during office visits. Plus, doctors love it when you quote studies to them. I highly recommend it.

What do you see as the biggest challenges in this job? Biggest opportunities?
Unpaywall takes a lot of data sources with wildly varying degrees of organization and completeness and aims to provide a reliable dataset that lets many types of users access them in a uniform way. Systems that implement clean interfaces to the messy and unpredictable human world are always challenging to master. As usual the challenge implies the opportunity, in that if we do it right we can spare a lot of people this work.

If you were stranded on a desert island with any researcher (miraculously raised from the dead if needed), who would it be and why?
Carl Sagan. I don’t think this needs justification.

We are so thrilled and excited to be adding Richard to our team. We decided early on that we only wanted to work with fantastic people, and Richard definitely fits the bill. With Richard’s help, we’re going to be releasing some pretty exciting stuff this year. Can’t wait to show y’all!

PS this post is actually going up pretty late, since Richard joined us in December 2018, but better late than never….