News

OurResearch receives $7.5M grant from Arcadia to establish OpenAlex, a milestone development for Open Science

OurResearch is proud to announce a $7.5M grant from Arcadia, to establish a sustainable and completely open index of the world’s research ecosystem. With this 5-year grant, OurResearch expands their open science ambitions to replace paywalled knowledge graphs with OpenAlex.

Researchers, funders, and organizations around the world rely on scientific knowledge graphs to find, perform, and manage their research. For decades, only paywalled proprietary systems have provided this information and they have become unaffordable (costing libraries $1B annually); uninclusive (systematically excluding works from some fields and geographies); and unavailable (even paid subscribers are limited in their use of the data).

OpenAlex indexes more than twice as many scholarly works as the leading proprietary products and the entirety of the knowledge graph and its source code are openly licensed and freely available through data snapshots, an easy to use API, and a nascent user interface.

OurResearch has a decade of sustained experience developing tools that advance open science. Funds from Arcadia will fuel the development needed to establish OpenAlex as the go-to scientific knowledge graph for researchers and organizations around the world. Long-term sustainability of OpenAlex will be achieved through value-add premium services.

Development of OpenAlex started only two years ago and it already serves 115M API calls per month; underlies a major university ranking; is displacing proprietary products at Universities; and has established partnerships with national governments. We are excited by these early successes of OpenAlex and its promise to revolutionize scholarly communication and democratize the world’s research.

— — — — 

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, like Unpaywall and Unsub.

Arcadia is a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge. Since 2002 Arcadia has awarded more than $1 billion to organizations around the world.

Coverage in the Financial Times of OpenAlex and the Sorbonne

The Financial Times recently published an article detailing Sorbonne University’s “radical decision” to switch to OpenAlex for its publication database and bibliometric analytics. The article (behind a paywall, unfortunately 😞) came out a little while ago, but we wanted to highlight it here in case you missed it.

The news comes in the context of “a wider pushback against the current model in academic publishing, where researchers publish and review papers for free but have to buy expensive subscriptions to the journals in which they are published to analyse data relating to their work.” It includes a quote from OurResearch/OpenAlex co-founder and CEO Jason Priem: “We felt there’s a mismatch between the values of the academy and the shareholder boardroom. Research is fundamentally about sharing, while for-profits are fundamentally about capturing and enclosing. We aim to create and sustain research infrastructure that’s truly aligned with . . . the values of the research community.”

Exciting times for OpenAlex and open science!

Jack, Andrew. “Sorbonne’s Embrace of Free Research Platform Shakes up Academic Publishing.” Financial Times, December 27, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/89098b25-78af-4539-ba24-c770cf9ec7c3.

Sorbonne University announces switch to OpenAlex

We at OpenAlex are thrilled at Sorbonne University’s recent announcement that they will be switching to OpenAlex for their publication database and bibliometric analytics, abandoning the use of proprietary products! The Sorbonne, a leading French university, made their announcement in a recent post (click here for the English version; click here for the French version). Starting in 2024, they will be ending their subscription to Web of Science and Clarivate’s bibliometric tools. They will instead be adopting “open, free and participatory tools, and [they are] now working on the consolidation of a sustainable and international alternative, relying in particular on the OpenAlex tool.”

OpenAlex has been working closely with the Sorbonne to make this switch possible, and as they note, “A partnership agreement will shortly be established between Sorbonne University and OpenAlex to formalize their contributions and mutual commitments … and to bring about developments that will meet the needs of its community.” This is an extremely exciting milestone for us and for open science! We invite you all to celebrate with us 🎉🎉🎉!

OurResearch news: Heather stepping down

Hi everybody, this is Heather. I wanted to let you know I’m stepping down from OurResearch, effective mid-June 2022.

I’m so proud of what we’ve built over the last 10 years. I firmly believe the team will keep doing great things to advance open infrastructure in scholarly communications. My departure is on the most amicable of terms, and I will remain on the Board of Directors and OurResearch’s biggest fan.

Why leave? I’m ready for a change. This move has been in the works for some time. To start with I’ll take a few months off to rest and spend with my family (and cycle, read, and eat cookies) and then I’m not sure! 

Will keep this short and sweet because otherwise I’ll probably cry — building these ideas and tools with Jason has always been a labour of love. Wishing everyone the best. 

Rooting for the openiest of science ASAP,

Heather

Hey, this is Jason. This post is tough to write because I’d really like to say something profound and moving, something that expresses how much the last eleven years working with Heather have meant to me. Something that expresses how much I admire, respect, and love her. Something that conveys how OurResearch will always be incomplete without her–but how, at the same time, I’m 100% sure that we’ll continue to grow and prosper, thanks to the work she’s put in.

Now, I know that y’all know Heather is amazing. You know she’s smart and tough and kind and pragmatic and idealistic and authentic and clever and relentless and funny. You know that she’s put her heart and soul and love and self into Open Science and into OurResearch, and you know that she’s got a bigger heart and soul and love and self than just about anyone.

But y’all don’t know it like I know it.  I’ve seen it, up close, for eleven years. I’ve seen her on sleepless nights, when we had no money, when people were being mean, when servers were down, in the darkest and toughest of times. And I’ve never stopped being inspired by her. I’ve seen her perform code miracles and budget miracles and admin miracles and everything in between. And more than that: I’ve seen her do it with unflagging kindness, humility, and integrity. I’ve seen her as few have.

And I’m forever, deeply grateful for that: that I got to see her in action, be on her team, experience all the crazy highs and lows and sidewayses of cofounderdom with her. It’s been a profound honor.

So even more than I’ll miss Heather, I’m grateful for Heather. And I’ll be trying very hard to live up to her example, to practice all I’ve learned from her. Which means I’ll be working my guts out for OurResearch, because I believe in it with all my heart. We’ve got a great product in OpenAlex, a great team, a great board (including Heather still, huzzah!) and we’re going to be doing great things. I know that’s what Heather wants, and it’s what I want, and by golly we’ll do it. 

I’ll miss you, Heath. Thanks for a great decade. We won’t let you down.

j

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!

Impactstory is now Our Research

Big news: today Impactstory is changing our name! Meet: Our Research!

1. Why the change?

TL;DR we outgrew our old name and need a new one that fits broader scope of our work.

We’ve been passionate about Open Science from the beginning. That’s what we both researched as academics. And it’s what brought us together eight years ago, in the impromptu all-night hackathon where we built the first version of Impactstory Profiles. Open Science has been our passion through fast times and slow, fat times and lean. That’s Us.

Because of that we’ve jumped at chances to take on new Open Science infrastructure projects in the last eight years, projects like:

  • Unpaywall, an open index of the world’s Open Access papers,
  • Get The Research, a website to help regular people find, read, and understand research,
  • Depsy (and its yet-unnamed follow-up) to help show the impact of research software,
  • and we’ve got several new projects launching later this year (stay tuned :).

We’ve never seen these as distractions from our mission. We’ve seen them as our mission. And we’ve been thankful to have had the chance to work across several of the schools of Open Science. That’s going to continue as in coming months we leverage our new ability to fund projects with self-generated revenue. We’re thrilled at this.

However, it does mean that Impactstory name is becoming increasingly confusing. We love helping folks tell Stories about Impact…but that’s not all we do, and hasn’t been for a while now. So it’s time to change our name to reflect that.

2. Why the Our Research name?

TL;DR: “Research” means what it says. “Our” means we want research to belong to 1) humankind and 2) the academic community.

To answer that question more fully, let’s break the name down into its parts:

Research: The global Research enterprise is what we want to improve. And all research, not just Science (although we do suspect that the term “Open Science” is, while lamentably inaccurate, probably here to stay at this point). 

Our: Of course our is a possessive we. So who’s the “we” and what’s it possessing? There are two answers:

Most broadly we is…everyone. It’s every human who has ever woken up on this rock with a list of unanswered questions and unsolved problems and thought, hey let’s figure this out. Research is how we figure it out. The “our” is  possessive because (we believe) research belongs to to all of us, as humans. Knowing is a team sport. Our Research is dedicated to making our research knowledge more open and accessible to our species, because we’re all in this together.

More narrowly (and less grandiosely), we is the academic community: researchers, administrators, librarians, and everyone else working together to create all this new knowledge. We in the nonprofit academic world have our own way of looking at things, a perspective that’s quite different from the profit-driven priorities of the business world. Collaboration with for-profits can be valuable. But we (and lot of other folks)  don’t think for-profits should own our core scholarly infrastructure. We should. The scholarly community.  As a mission-driven nonprofit, Our Research works to build our research infrastructure in ways concordant with the shared values of our academic community. A lot of other folks feel the same.

3. What is Our Research trying to do?

TL;DR: we’re about what we’ve always been about: helping to bring about universal Open Science by building open, functional, sustainable infrastructure.

We felt like the new name was a good excuse to sit down and explicitly articulate our core values. There’s five. We value:

  • openness: We default to sharing. Our code is open-source and our data is open, too.
  • progress:  We seek revolution. We want to transform how scholars share, assess, and reuse research, moving beyond the paper to value all research products. 
  • community: We reach out. We’re proud to lead, proud to follow, and proud to work with anyone who shares our values. 
  • pragmatism:  We favor action over words. We make do with what we have, take what we can get. We ship.
  • sustainability: We’re not too proud or pure to hustle for cash–revolutions ain’t free. We’re now financially self-sustaining and aim to stay that way.

We’re so excited to move forward, guided by these values. We’ve got a lot to learn still, and a long long way to go before we reach our goals. But we’re bigger, better-funded, and more motivated than we’ve ever been. We are so, so thankful to everyone who has supported Impactstory for the last eight years. We hope that in the Our Research era we’ll make y’all proud. We’re sure gonna do our best. 

If you’d like to be notified about the cool stuff we’re launching later this year, sign up for our mailing list!

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….

Unpaywall extension adds 200,000th active user

We’re thrilled to announce that we’re now supporting over 200,000 active users of the Unpaywall extension for Chrome and Firefox!

The extension, which debuted nearly two years ago, helps users find legal, open access copies of paywalled scholarly articles. Since its release, the extension has been used more than 45 million times, finding an open access copy in about half of those. We’ve also been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, Boing Boing, and Nature (twice).

However, although the extension gets the press, the database powering the extension is the real star. There are millions of people using the Unpaywall database every day:

  • We deliver nearly one million OA papers every day to users worldwide via our open API…that’s 10 papers every second!
  • Over 1,600 academic libraries use our SFX integration to automatically find and deliver OA copies of articles when they have no subscription access.
  • If you’re using an academic discovery tool, it probably includes Unpaywall data…we’re integrated into Web of Science, Europe PubMed Central, WorldCat, Scopus, Dimensions, and many others.
  • Our data is used to inform and monitor OA policy at organizations like the US NIH, UK Research and Innovation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the European Open Science Monitor, and many others.

The Unpaywall database gets information from over 50,000 academic journals and 5000 scholarly repositories and archives, tracking OA status for more than 100 million articles. You can access this data for free using our open API, or user our free web-based query tool. Or if you prefer, you can just download the whole database for free.

Unpaywall is supported via subscriptions to the Unpaywall Data Feed, a high-throughput pipeline providing weekly updates to our free database dump. Thanks to Data Feed subscribers, Unpaywall is completely self-sustaining and uses no grant funding. That makes us real optimistic about our ability to stick around and provide open infrastructure for lots of other cool projects.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this project, and even more, thanks to everyone who has fought for open access. Without y’all, Unpaywall wouldn’t matter. With you: we’re changing the world. Together. Next stop 300k!

Elsevier becomes newest customer of Unpaywall Data Feed


We’re pleased to announce that Elsevier has become the newest customer of Impactstory’s Unpaywall Data Feed, which provides a weekly feed of changes in Unpaywall, our open database of 20 million open access articles. Elsevier will use the Unpaywall database to make open access content easier to find on Scopus.

Elsevier joins Clarivate Analytics, Digital Science, Zotero, and many other organizations as paying subscribers to the Data Feed.  Paying subscribers provide sustainability for Unpaywall, and fund the many free ways to access Unpaywall data, including complete database snapshots as well as our open API, Simple Query Tool, and browser extension. We’re proud that thousands of academic libraries and other institutions, as well as over 150,000 individual extension users, are using these free tools.

Impactstory’s mission is to help all people access all research products. Adding Elsevier as a Data Feed customer helps us further that mission. Specifically, the new agreement injects OA from our index into the workflows of the many Scopus users worldwide, helping them find and use open research they may never have seen before. So, we’re happy to welcome Elsevier as our latest Data Feed customer.

Introducing Unpaywall: unlock paywalled research papers as you browse


Last Friday night we tweeted about a new Chrome extension we’ve been working on. It’s called Unpaywall, and it links you to free fulltext as you browse research articles. Hit a paywall? No problem: click the green tab and read it free.

Unpaywall is powered by an index of over ten million legally-uploaded, open-access resources, and it delivers. For example, in a set of 11k recent cancer research articles covered in mainstream media, Unpaywall users were able to read around half of them for free–even without any subscription, and even though most of them were paywalled.

So far the response to Friday’s tweet has been amazing — 500 retweets, and in just a few days we’ve gotten more than 1500 installations: Hockey stick growth!  🙂

 

And we’ve also gotten rave reviews, like this one from Sarah:

Why the excitement?  Finding free, legal, open access is now super easy — it happens automatically.  With the Unpaywall extension, links to open access are automatically available as you browse.

This is useful for researchers like Ethan.  It’s also really helpful for people outside academia, who don’t enjoy the expensive subscription benefits of institutional libraries. This is especially true for nonprofits:

…. and folks working to communicate scholarship to a broader audience:

Go give it a try and see what you think! The official release is April 4th, but you can already  install it, learn more, and follow @unpaywall. We’d love your help to spread the word about Unpaywall to your friends and colleagues. Together we can accelerate toward to a future of full #openaccess for all!