We’re excited to announce that we’ve added a new full-time employee to Impactstory. Richard Orr has joined us as the lead developer on Unpaywall. He’s fantastic, and has already made a big impact in the stability, performance, and feature set of Unpaywall–as well as massively improving the speed at which we address bugs. We are so excited about how much we’re going to be able to achieve now that Richard is on board!
By way of introduction, here’s a quick interview we did with Richard:
What drew you to this job?
The opportunity to contribute to science and make the world better. I’ve never had the required focus to become an expert in one field and make a big contribution in one area, so the chance to help everyone and make a small contribution in a lot of different areas was very appealing.
What will you be working on?
I’ll be working on Unpaywall, making it find more open access articles more accurately. I’ll also be making it work with other projects we have planned that will go beyond indexing articles by DOI and help you discover research in other ways.
What’s a time you’ve tried to find free-to-read scholarly literature for your own use?
Reading actual reviewed computer science papers has been extremely helpful in personal projects involving GPU computing. As a non-researcher it’s easy to forget that not everything is on Stack Overflow. With medical issues, I like to read relevant research myself so I know what questions to ask to make the best use of time during office visits. Plus, doctors love it when you quote studies to them. I highly recommend it.
What do you see as the biggest challenges in this job? Biggest opportunities?
Unpaywall takes a lot of data sources with wildly varying degrees of organization and completeness and aims to provide a reliable dataset that lets many types of users access them in a uniform way. Systems that implement clean interfaces to the messy and unpredictable human world are always challenging to master. As usual the challenge implies the opportunity, in that if we do it right we can spare a lot of people this work.
If you were stranded on a desert island with any researcher (miraculously raised from the dead if needed), who would it be and why?
Carl Sagan. I don’t think this needs justification.
We are so thrilled and excited to be adding Richard to our team. We decided early on that we only wanted to work with fantastic people, and Richard definitely fits the bill. With Richard’s help, we’re going to be releasing some pretty exciting stuff this year. Can’t wait to show y’all!
PS this post is actually going up pretty late, since Richard joined us in December 2018, but better late than never….