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.

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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.

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 🎉🎉🎉!