Why OurResearch?

I’m thrilled to have landed a job with OurResearch working full-time on Unsub. When I was looking for a job this summer I wanted a new experience; I wanted to be challenged and to learn new skills – Unsub was the perfect match. With respect to coding, I moved from 100% R programming to 100% Python. In addition, the domain (tools for librarians) is very different from my previous job (open source software for researchers) – just the big change I wanted. 

Academic Libraries

Despite coming into this job without experience working as a librarian, I’ve always deeply appreciated libraries and the work librarians do. During my time in academia (bachelors through post-doc) I benefited a lot from various university libraries (Rice University and Simon Fraser University, to name a few), and experienced the technological change from print to electronic as ILL requests first came in hardbound and printed form, then transitioned to electronic forms. I’m excited to be able to help librarians after benefiting from their work for so many years.

What I’ll work on

As the Unsub product owner I’ll make decisions about features, implement those features, fix bugs, do demos for librarians, and of course do lots of support. I’m excited to make Unsub the best tool for librarians to reevaluate big deals and understand their cancellation options. 

Challenges and opportunities

The biggest challenge I see in maintaining Unsub is making sure our forecasts are as accurate as possible. I’ve learned already that it can be difficult to keep track of what publishers are doing with respect to big deals, title by title prices, etc. 

There’s a big, neh huge, opportunity here to push scholarly literature much further towards open access – while at the same time freeing up library budgets to support more collaborative players in the scholarly publishing community.