Formation | 2011[1] |
---|---|
Founder | Jason Priem Heather Piwowar |
Type | Nonprofit Organization |
46-1599252 | |
Legal status | 501(c)(3) organization |
Headquarters | Sanford, NC [2] |
Location | |
Services | Unpaywall, Unsub, OpenAlex, ImpactStory, Depsy |
Website | ourresearch |
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 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, 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] As of 2024, Unpaywall claims to provide access to 49 million free articles. [17] It further states that "Unpaywall users read 52% of research papers for free". [18] 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]
In 2019, GetTheResearch.org [19] was announced as a search engine for open access content found by Unpaywall, with machine learning features to facilitate discoverability. [20]
Unsub, [21] previously Unpaywall Journals, [22] was launched in 2019 [23] as a data analysis tool for libraries to estimate the actual cost and value of their subscriptions. [24]
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, [25] article processing charges, usage statistics and the libraries' own parameters [26] (such as the cost of ILL [27] ) to calculate various indicators [28] including the cost effectiveness or net cost per use [29] 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, [30] allowing expected savings of 50–70% over the baseline, or 5 to 7 million dollars per year. [31]
OpenAlex [32] is an open catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, and more. OpenAlex launched in January 2022 with a free API and data snapshot. [33] 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. [34] It is considered an alternative to the Microsoft Academic Graph, which retired on Dec 31, 2021. [35] [36]
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. [37]
CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge.
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; they also fit within the URI system. They are widely used to identify academic, professional, and government information, such as journal articles, research reports, data sets, and official publications.
Bibliometrics is the application of statistical methods to the study of bibliographic data, especially in scientific and library and information science contexts, and is closely associated with scientometrics to the point that both fields largely overlap.
Scientometrics is a subfield of informetrics that studies quantitative aspects of scholarly literature. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.
An institutional repository (IR) is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published works to increase their visibility and collaboration with other academics However, most of these outputs produced by universities are not effectively accessed and shared by researchers and other stakeholders As a result academics should be involved in the implementation and development of an IR project so that they can learn the benefits and purpose of building an IR.
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.
Sage Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American independent academic publishing company, founded in 1965 in New York City by Sara Miller McCune and now based in the Newbury Park neighborhood of Thousand Oaks, California.
A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.
Crossref is a nonprofit open digital infrastructure organisation for the global scholarly research community. Uniquely and persistently recording and connecting knowledge through open metadata and identifiers for all research objects such as grants and articles. It is the largest digital object identifier (DOI) Registration Agency of the International DOI Foundation. It has 19,000 members from 150 countries representing publishers, libraries, research institutions, and funders and was launched in early 2000 as a cooperative effort among publishers to enable persistent cross-platform citation linking in online academic journals. As of July 2023, Crossref identifies and connects 150 million records of metadata about research objects made openly available for reuse without restriction. They facilitate an average of 1.1 billion DOI resolutions every month, and they see 1 billion queries of the metadata every month.
The Web of Science is a paid-access platform that provides access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines. Until 1997, it was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is currently owned by Clarivate.
Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet's capacity for widespread distribution of reading material.
In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors while only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. The rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
Microsoft Academic was a free internet-based academic search engine for academic publications and literature, developed by Microsoft Research in 2016 as a successor of Microsoft Academic Search. Microsoft Academic was shut down in 2022. Both OpenAlex and The Lens claim to be successors to Microsoft Academic.
Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.
Subscribe to Open (S2O) is an economic model used by peer-reviewed scholarly journals to provide readers with open access (OA) to the journal’s content, without charging costs to authors. S2O converts journals that have a traditional subscription model to open access.
Leap over tall paywalls in a single bound.
We look for open copies of articles using the following data sources: ...