Our Research

Nonprofit organization

OurResearch

Logo of OurResearch

Formation| 2011; 12 years ago (2011)[1]
Founder| Jason Priem
Heather Piwowar
Type| Nonprofit Organization

Tax ID no.

| 46-1599252
Legal status| 501(c)(3) organization
Headquarters| Sanford, NC[2]
Location|

* Vancouver

Services| Unpaywall, Unsub, OpenAlex, ImpactStory, Depsy
Website| ourresearch.org

Formerly called

| ImpactStory

OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization that creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data (to the extent allowed by providers' terms of service), code,[3] and governance.[4] OurResearch is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,[5] the National Science Foundation,[6] and Arcadia Fund.[7][8]

## ImpactStory[edit]

ImpactStory is the first open source, web-based tool released by OurResearch. It provides altmetrics to help researchers measure the impacts of their research outputs including journal articles, blog posts, datasets, and software.[9] This aims to change the focus of the scholarly reward system to value and encourage web-native scholarship.

It provides context to its metrics so that they are meaningful without knowledge of the specific dataset: for example, instead of letting the reader guess whether having five forks on GitHub is common, ImpactStory would tell that the repository is in the 95th percentile of all GitHub repositories created that year.[10]

The metrics provided by ImpactStory can be used by researchers who want to know how many times their work has been downloaded and shared,[11] and also research funders who are interested in the impact of research beyond only considering citations to journal articles.

## Unpaywall[edit]

Unpaywall, begun as an interface for oaDOI.org,[12][13] is a browser extension[14] which finds legal free versions of (paywalled) scholarly articles.[15] In July 2018, Unpaywall was reported to provide free access to 20 million articles,[1] which accounts for about 47% of the articles that people search for with Unpaywall.[16] In June 2017, it was integrated into Web of Science, and in July 2018, Elsevier announced plans the same month to integrate the service into the Scopus search engine.[1]

## GetTheResearch.org[edit]

In 2019, GetTheResearch.org[17] was announced as a search engine for open access content found by Unpaywall, with machine learning features to facilitate discoverability.[18]

## Unsub[edit]

Unsub,[19] previously Unpaywall Journals,[20] was launched in 2019[21] as a data analysis tool for libraries to estimate the actual cost and value of their subscriptions.[22]

The tool reduces information asymmetry in negotiations over subscriptions with publishers: in its paid tailored version, it allows to merge Unpaywall data about open access status and expected evolution in 5 years,[23] article processing charges, usage statistics and the libraries' own parameters[24] (such as the cost of ILL[25]) to calculate various indicators[26] including the cost effectiveness or net cost per use[27] of a current or planned subscription (or lack thereof).

Unpaywall Journals was used in 2020 by the SUNY Libraries Consortium to assist in the cancellation of their big deal with Elsevier, which was replaced by a subscription to 248 titles,[28] allowing expected savings of 50–70% over the baseline, or 5 to 7 million dollars per year.[29]

## OpenAlex[edit]

OpenAlex[30] is an open catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, and more. OpenAlex launched in January 2022 with a free API and data snapshot.[31] The purpose of OpenAlex is to catalog publication sources, author information, and research topics. It also shows connections between these data points to provide a comprehensive, interlinked view of the global research system.[32] It is considered an alternative to the Microsoft Academic Graph, which retired on Dec 31, 2021.[33][34]

OpenAlex contains extensive metadata across scientific works, authors, publication venues, institutions, and concepts. Specifically, it includes metadata for 209 million works such as journal articles and books; 13 million authors with disambiguated identities; metadata for 124,000 venues that host works, including journals and online repositories; metadata for 109,000 institutions; and 65,000 concepts from Wikidata, which are algorithmically linked to works using an automated hierarchical multi-tag classifier.[35]

## See also[edit]

* Scihub
* #ICanHazPDF
* Library Genesis
* Open Access Button

## References[edit]

1. ^ a b c Else, Holly (15 August 2018). "How Unpaywall is transforming open science". Nature. 560 (7718): 290–291. Bibcode:2018Natur.560..290E. doi:10.1038/D41586-018-05968-3. PMID 30111793.
2. ^ "Entry of Impactstory in GuideStar". GuideStar. Archived from the original on 2020-11-25. Retrieved 2020-11-13.
3. ^ "ImpactStory total-impact". GitHub. Archived from the original on 6 October 2013. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
4. ^ "Sloan Foundation grant submitted". ImpactStory blog. 1 March 2012. Archived from the original on 2 January 2014. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
5. ^ "About". ImpactStory. Archived from the original on 25 December 2013. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
6. ^ "ImpactStory awarded $300k NSF grant!". ImpactStory. 27 September 2013. Archived from the original on 27 September 2013. Retrieved 2 January 2014.
7. ^ "This tool is saving universities millions of dollars in journal subscriptions". Science | AAAS. July 9, 2020. Archived from the original on November 1, 2020. Retrieved November 13, 2020.
8. ^ "Impactstory awarded $850k to build open-access, AI-powered scholarly search engine, aims to help public find and understand research" (PDF). ImpactStory. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 19, 2019.
9. ^ Priem, Jason; Heather Piwowar (25 September 2012). "The launch of ImpactStory: using altmetrics to tell data-driven stories". Impact of Social Sciences. LSE. Archived from the original on 2 January 2014. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
10. ^ "ImpactStory adds figshare integration". Research Information. 3 December 2013. Archived from the original on 2 January 2014. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
11. ^ Eisen, Jonathan (29 November 2012). "Playing with Impact Story to look at Alt Metrics for my papers, data, etc". The Tree of Life. Archived from the original on 23 October 2014. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
12. ^ "Paste in a DOI". oaDOI. Impactstory. 23 October 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-10-23. Retrieved 23 October 2022. "Leap over tall paywalls in a single bound."
13. ^ "About". oaDOI. Impactstory. 31 May 2017. Archived from the original on 2016-10-23. Retrieved 23 October 2022. "We look for open copies of articles using the following data sources: ..."
14. ^ Coldewey, Devin (5 April 2017). "Unpaywall scours the web for free versions of scientific papers". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 16 August 2018. Retrieved 16 August 2018.
15. ^ Chawla, Dalmeet Singh (4 April 2017). "Unpaywall finds free versions of paywalled papers". Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21765. S2CID 86694031.
16. ^ Doctorow, Cory (6 February 2018). "Unpaywall: a search-engine for authorized, freely accessible versions of scholarly journal articles". Boing Boing. Archived from the original on 2018-08-16. Retrieved 2018-08-16.
17. ^ "Get The Research". gettheresearch.org. Retrieved 23 October 2022.
18. ^ Price, Gary (15 May 2019). "Impactstory Announces Beta Release of "Get The Research" Search Engine". LJ infoDOCKET. Archived from the original on 2020-05-19. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
19. ^ "Unsub". unsub.org. Archived from the original on 2021-01-22. Retrieved 2021-01-16.
20. ^ Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (2020-05-19). "Taking a Big Bite Out of the Big Deal". The Scholarly Kitchen. Archived from the original on 2020-05-25. Retrieved 2020-05-19.
21. ^ Piwowar, Heather (2019-11-26). "Unpaywall". Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3553751. Archived from the original on 2020-08-06. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
22. ^ Ian Mulvany (2019-11-06). "Unpaywall Journals - possibly the most interesting thing to happen this year in library subscription land". ScholCommsProd. Archived from the original on 2020-04-22. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
23. ^ Piwowar, Heather; Priem, Jason; Orr, Richard (2019-10-09). "The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership". bioRxiv: 795310. doi:10.1101/795310. S2CID 208591684. Archived from the original on 2020-03-10. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
24. ^ Piwowar, Heather (7 Jan 2020). "Configuration settings". Unpaywall. Archived from the original on 9 August 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
25. ^ Piwowar, Heather (25 Feb 2020). "Overview". Unpaywall. Archived from the original on 9 August 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
26. ^ Piwowar, Heather (14 Jan 2020). "Description of data fields". Unpaywall. Archived from the original on 9 August 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
27. ^ Piwowar, Heather (8 Jan 2020). "Cost Effectiveness (NCPPU)". Unpaywall. Archived from the original on 9 August 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
28. ^ Wolfe, Denise (April 7, 2020). "SUNY Negotiates New, Modified Agreement with Elsevier". Libraries News Center University at Buffalo Libraries. Archived from the original on 2020-05-14. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
29. ^ Pritting, Shannon (April 7, 2020). "Elsevier Update". SUNY Libraries Consortium. Archived from the original on 2020-04-18. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
30. ^ "OpenAlex". Retrieved 2022-01-16.
31. ^ Piwowar, Heather (2022-01-06). "OpenAlex launch!". OurResearch blog.
32. ^ Singh Chawla, Dalmeet (2022-01-24). "Massive open index of scholarly papers launches". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-00138-y. S2CID 246278314.
33. ^ "Next Steps for Microsoft Academic - Expanding into New Horizons". Microsoft Research. 4 May 2021. Retrieved 2021-05-28.
34. ^ "Fossil-record bias and huge research database". Nature. 601 (7893): 303. 2022-01-20. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-00103-9. ISSN 0028-0836. S2CID 256820124.
35. ^ Priem, Jason; Piwowar, Heather; Orr, Richard (2022). "OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts". arXiv:2205.01833 [cs.DL].

## Further reading[edit]

* Dhakal, Kerry (15 April 2019). "Unpaywall". Journal of the Medical Library Association. 107 (2): 286–288. doi:10.5195/jmla.2019.650. PMC 6466485.

## External links[edit]

* Official website
* Unpaywall