OurResearch is proud to announce a grant of $688,800 from The Navigation Fund to develop and launch an open, sustainable, web-based research intelligence (RI) module for the OpenAlex website. Our goal is to support expert finding, trend detection, and knowledge gap identification for researchers and research users. The RI module will serve as a map of the research landscape that’s easy to use for non-technical users, powerful for technical users, and supportive in helping all users increase their technical skills.

OpenAlex is the world’s first completely open and comprehensive index of the world’s research ecosystem. For the first time, everyone in the world has unrestricted access to a graph of the research ecosystem connecting hundreds of millions of scholarly outputs from thousands of fields across the globe to 100+ million authors from 100,000+ institutions. Hundreds of academic studies have already used OpenAlex to accelerate their research and to study science itself  (link); universities and governments are adopting OpenAlex for their research intelligence needs, disrupting the established proprietary model (example); University rankings are switching to OpenAlex (example); and companies big and small around the world are using OpenAlex data to drive innovation previously not possible. 

While we are thrilled by the early success of OpenAlex, we have noticed two significant barriers that are impeding more widespread adoption of OpenAlex: (1) many people (especially decision-makers) struggle to understand the promise of OpenAlex without seeing its potential first hand and (2) even when people can imagine how OpenAlex can benefit their work, most do not have the technical resources and capacity to create the desired insights from the openly available data. 

With this grant, we have just hired a Senior Frontend Developer, starting December 2, 2024 to design and iteratively release new UI features. The expected UI enhancements will lead to better and more timely research-based outcomes in both enterprise and academia, including more productive collaborations, faster investigation of promising research fronts, and quicker time-to-market for new discoveries. Stay tuned for exciting updates to the OpenAlex web interface in 2025!

— — — — 

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, Unsub, and OpenAlex.

The Navigation Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization seeking to advance bold solutions to the world’s most urgent problems. 

It’s a new year and at OurResearch we’re starting off 2023 full steam ahead! We’ve revamped the OpenAlex documentation so that it’s easier to get started, and easier to find the fields and filters that are available in the OpenAlex API. It should take less “clicks” to find what you need.

Poised for growth

The major change we made was to highlight the core entities (works, authors, etc) in OpenAlex, giving them their own up-front space. OpenAlex grew considerably in 2022, not only in number records, but also by the number of ways that you can filter, group, and search scholarly data. This new approach provides more room to add and document filters. We can better describe the unique search capabilities available in each entity. Overall, it sets us up to grow again in 2023.

Our goal is to maintain friendly and approachable documentation, so hopefully we’ve kept that up as well. If you find something broken, or have some suggested improvements, let us know!

We’ve improved the author search feature within OpenAlex, so you get more results when searching for author names that may or may not include diacritics. For example, a search for the name “David Tarragó” will return the same number of results as the the version that is converted via Lucene’s ASCII folding filter, which in this case is “David Tarrago”.

When searching with diacritics, results with the queried diacritics are more likely to be ranked towards the top. So the two searches may have slightly different rankings. You can see the results of these two searches in the API:

• Search for David Tarragó: https://api.openalex.org/authors?search=david%20Tarrag%C3%B3
• Search for David Tarrago: https://api.openalex.org/authors?search=david%20Tarrago

These queries return the same number of results, with diacritic and non-diacritic names included. Keep in mind that results are weighted by the author’s works count, so that has an impact on relevance as well.

Why make this change?

When creating the OpenAlex author search capability, it was important for us to honor author’s names by respecting diacritics. So searching with a diacritic returned results with diacritics. However, this strict approach makes it harder to find some authors. We’re comfortable with the compromise of searching with and without diacritics at the same time, while giving priority to the intended search query. Hopefully this improved feature is helpful!

Did you know that you can request up to 50 DOIs in a single API call? That’s possible due to the OR query in the OpenAlex API and looks like this:

https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=doi:10.3322/caac.21660|https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n71|10.3322/caac.21654&mailto=support@openalex.org

We simply separate our DOIs with the pipe symbol ‘|’. That query will return three works associated with the three DOIs we entered. As you can see in the query, a short form DOI or long form DOI (as a URL) are both supported.

This will save time and resources when requesting many DOIs. This technique works with all IDs in OpenAlex, to include OpenAlex IDs and PubMed Central IDs (PMID).

Example with python requests

Let’s write an example python script to show how we can get DOIs in batches of 50 using requests:

import requests

dois = ["10.3322/caac.21660", "https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n71", "10.3322/caac.21654"]
pipe_separated_dois = "|".join(dois)
r = requests.get(f"https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=doi:{pipe_separated_dois}&per-page=50&mailto=support@openalex.org")
works = r.json()["results"]

for work in works:
  print(work["doi"], work["display_name"])

# results
https://doi.org/10.3322/caac.21660 Global Cancer Statistics 2020: GLOBOCAN Estimates of Incidence and Mortality Worldwide for 36 Cancers in 185 Countries
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n71 The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews
https://doi.org/10.3322/caac.21654 Cancer Statistics, 2021

Hope this is helpful!

Hi I’m Casey. I am excited to announce that I am now full time with OurResearch as a software engineer working on OpenAlex and Unpaywall!

My Journey

I freelanced for OurResearch prior to joining full time this summer. With Jason and Heather’s help I maintained Paperbuzz, Cite-As, and also built out a project to catalog academic journal pricing. With freelancing I was able to improve my python and data management skills in order to tackle bigger projects.

Prior to freelancing I enjoyed a career in the US Air Force, which I am proud of. I’m fortunate to have hundreds of hours as aircrew on multiple aircraft, as well as a variety of technical and leadership assignments. So if you ever want to talk airplanes be ready because I might talk your ear off!

My academic experience comes from my time in university pursuing advanced education.

My Vision with OurResearch

In December I helped build the API and set up Elasticsearch for a project called OpenAlex. That project has continued to grow and I love to see how many people are using it. My core job with OpenAlex is to provide front-line customer support, as well as maintain and improve the API and search infrastructure. I’m also working on several parts of UnPaywall.

It’s incredible that OurResearch tools are freely open and available. I find OurResearch has similar core values as my time in the Air Force: small teams empowered to make decisions, humble and accepting of feedback in order to make things better. That’s why we believe our community of users are invaluable and important in keeping those tools free, open, and easy to use.

So we will listen to your feedback, fix bugs and implement features quickly, and continue to maintain our documentation so the dataset and APIs are as frictionless as they can be. We welcome and need your help with this mission! So do not hesitate to contact me or the team.

I look forward to improving OpenAlex and Unpaywall, and to meeting those of you using OurResearch products!

– Casey

Unsub is a dashboard that helps you reevaluate your big deal’s value and understand your cancellation options.

For the last few years we’ve supported a small set of very large publishers.

One of the most requested features has been support for more publishers.

As of today – right now – we support all publishers.

We heard you, and we’re super excited to get this in your hands. Here’s some important details:

• All publishers are supported. We no longer support specific publishers, but rather we support any publisher.
• A mix of publishers is supported. This was another oft requested feature, mostly related to aggregators, and actually naturally arose out of our change to support all publishers. Unsub dashboards no longer have logic filtering what titles are in your dashboard by publisher – so it’s just as easy for a dashboard to have titles from one publisher or 20 publishers.
• Title prices are now required. Supporting all publishers, it’s not feasible for us to collect and update titles prices for all of their titles. For existing Unsub packages created before today, we’ve incorporated the public prices we had (for the big 5 we supported: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE) into your packages. For new packages moving forward, you’ll have to upload your own title prices. We’ve updated the documentation accordingly.
• APC report has moved from package to institution level. We have APC data for the big 5 publishers, but now that we’re moving to any publisher, we can no longer provide publisher specific APC reports. However, you can now get an APC report for your institution that includes an estimate of your APC spend for the big 5 publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE). See the APC Report documentation page for more.

But, we didn’t stop there. Here’s some additional features you can use today that we think you’ll enjoy:

• Packages now have Descriptions. When you login to Unsub you’ll see evidence of this change straight away. You can use this package attribute to include a lot of detail about your package to remind your future self and others of important details about your package. See the docs for more information.
• Package views now have an Edit Details tab. In this tab you can change the package name and description. See the docs for more information.
• Packages have an optional filter setup step. This could be used for a variety of use cases, but first and foremost can be used to get back to the state of your package before today’s changes. That is, we no longer filter by publisher. If you had a Wiley package before today you should have only seen titles published by Wiley in your dashboard. However, moving forward, we do not filter by publisher, so that same Wiley package may include some titles from other publishers that were in your COUNTER reports. You can use this new feature to limit the set of titles that appear in your dashboard. See the Upload journal filter documentation page to learn more.

Notes:

• During testing, we heard that aggregators may not provide a COUNTER 5 TR_J2 file. As we require a TR_J2 file if you choose COUNTER 5 in Unsub, we provide a fake TR_J2 file. Let us know if you run into any issues with this! See the docs page for more info.
• As we support more publishers, we’ll run into more edge cases. We’ve heard that some publishers only provide a COUNTER 5 TR_J1 file – and do not provide TR_J2, TR_J3, and TR_J4 files. We don’t currently support the COUNTER 5 TR_J1 file. Get in touch if this is something you need.
• There may be “growing pains” moving from support for 5 publishers to all publishers. For example, journal metadata that’s crucial to Unsub may not be complete for some journals. Please do get in touch if you run into any issues. We’ll be keeping an eye on things and will

If you are not a current Unsub subscriber and you’re interested to learn more schedule a demo or go ahead and purchase.

If you are a current Unsub subscriber, log in, kick the tires, and let us know what you think.

To learn more about all the new features head over to our documentation.

In an upcoming webinar (date to be announced soon) I’ll dive into all the new features and answer any questions.

We’re starting an Unsub (https://unsub.org/) webinar series next week!

Why would you want to attend? These webinars should help you get better value from Unsub regardless of whether you want to just understand your options, get a better deal on your big deal, or cancel your big deal. 

Every two weeks we’ll cover a new topic, with two time slots for each topic to serve a wider array of time zones: morning and afternoon PST (Pacific Standard) time.

If our webinar times don’t work for you, we are planning to record webinars and upload them for anyone to watch on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/unsub).

Here are the first three topics we’ll cover:

• Feb 8 & 10: Unsub demo – an overview of the product
• Feb 22 & 24: Eric Schares demoing Unsub Extender
• Mar 8 & 10: Deep dive on Unsub scenarios

Other topics are in the works – we’ll announce them soon. Let us know here, elsewhere, or email me (scott@ourresearch.org) if there’s any topics you’d like covered in our webinar series.

The webinar series is free. However, we will require registration so we know how many people are coming and to make it easier for you to remember to attend (i.e., Zoom email confirmation, add to your calendar, etc). 

Our first webinar is titled Unsub Demo – An Overview of the Product – Feb 8 and 10:

• Date: Tuesday, February 8, 2022
• Time: 8:30 – 9:30 am PST (Time converter tool)
• Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIvduqvrT0iGtwrPdj0PQiTBcFhPEK7SQzx 

• Date: Thursday, February 10, 2022
• Time: 3:30 – 4:30 pm PST (Time converter tool)
• Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYocOmsqTkqGtyljdyLuTzm9vGCd-lhFn81

We’ll put out registration links soon for subsequent webinar topics.