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!