Hi, I’m Jason Portenoy, and I’m very happy to be joining OurResearch as the newest full-time team member! As a data engineer, I will be focusing my efforts on user engagement and outreach for OpenAlex. It is my responsibility to understand the OpenAlex dataset—its strengths and limitations—and work with the user community to improve it and make it easier to use.

I completed my PhD in Information Science at the University of Washington, studying the use of the scholarly literature as data to curate, explore, and evaluate scientific research. This field—known by various terms including scientometrics, science of science, metascience, and Big Scholarly Data—captivated me from the moment I learned about it. As the scale of scientific output continues to increase well beyond the capacity of any individual to make sense of it, the need for new tools and techniques to help becomes more and more pronounced. Working with Dr. Jevin West at the UW Datalab, I developed these tools and techniques—analyzing and visualizing scholarly data, and building recommender systems to connect scientists to new research and ideas. I extended this work through projects with Semantic Scholar, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, and JSTOR.

While working on these tools and analyses, I came to rely on several scholarly data sets, such as Web of Science and Microsoft Academic Graph. Through my experience, I became an advocate for having high-quality, open, and accessible data for researchers and builders to use. A solid foundation of quality data will strengthen all downstream applications, from simple counts and bibliometric statistics, to advanced natural language processing and complex systems approaches.

Joining the OpenAlex team is a fantastic opportunity for me to contribute to the future of scholarly data. When Microsoft decided to end its academic service, myself and many others in the community wondered what would come next. It has become clear that OpenAlex will play a key role in the future of this field. I come to this position with technical training as a data engineer and data scientist, as well as experience with scholarly data. My goal is to work with the community of users to continually improve the OpenAlex data and experience. If there’s anything you think I might be able to help with, please let us know!