OurResearch

Last updated
OurResearch
Formation2011;14 years ago (2011) [1]
FounderJason Priem
Heather Piwowar
TypeNonprofit Organization
46-1599252
Legal status 501(c)(3) organization
Headquarters Sanford, NC [2]
Location
ServicesUnpaywall, 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]

Contents

Services

ImpactStory

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

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]

GetTheResearch.org

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

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

Demo of the OpenAlex user interface as of March 2024

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 December 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]

See also

Related Research Articles

CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JSTOR</span> Distributor of ebooks and other digital media

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers 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, which regulates post-publication uses of the work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital object identifier</span> ISO standard unique string identifier for a digital object

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliometrics</span> Statistical analysis of written 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Scholar</span> Academic search service by Google

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sage Publishing</span> Independent academic publishing company

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crossref</span> Nonprofit open digital infrastructure organization

Crossref is a nonprofit open digital infrastructure organization for the global scholarly research community. 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Altmetrics</span> Alternative metrics for analyzing scholarship

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misleading information, deviates from the standard peer-review process, is highly non-transparent, and often utilizes aggressive solicitation practices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Access Button</span> Browser bookmarklet

The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet which registers when people hit a paywall to an academic article and cannot access it. It is supported by Medsin UK and the Right to Research Coalition.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sci-Hub</span> Scientific research paper file sharing website

Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy use/reliability and because of the enormous size of its collection; a 2018 study estimated that Sci-Hub provided access to most of the scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers. On 15 July 2022, Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprised 88,343,822 files. Since December 2020, the site has paused uploads due to legal troubles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Academic</span> Online bibliographic database

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Initiative for Open Citations</span>

The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is a project launched publicly in April 2017, that describes itself as: "a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data and to make these data available." It is intended to facilitate improved citation analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenAlex</span> Open catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, venues, and concepts

OpenAlex is a bibliographic catalogue of scientific papers, authors and institutions accessible in open access mode, named after the Library of Alexandria. It started operating in January 2022 by OurResearch as a successor of the terminated Microsoft Academic Graph. OpenAlex competes with commercial products such as Clarivate's Web of Science or Elsevier's Scopus, and is complemented by Bibliometrics tools and an API.

The open science movement has expanded the uses scientific output beyond specialized academic circles.

References

  1. 1 2 3 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. ↑ "Unpaywall". unpaywall.org. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  18. ↑ "Unpaywall". unpaywall.org. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  19. ↑ "Get The Research". gettheresearch.org. Retrieved 23 October 2022.
  20. ↑ 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.
  21. ↑ "Unsub". unsub.org. Archived from the original on 2021-01-22. Retrieved 2021-01-16.
  22. ↑ 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.
  23. ↑ Piwowar, Heather (2019-11-26). "Unpaywall". Zenodo. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3553751 . Archived from the original on 2020-08-06. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
  24. ↑ 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.
  25. ↑ 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.
  26. ↑ Piwowar, Heather (7 Jan 2020). "Configuration settings". Unpaywall. Archived from the original on 9 August 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
  27. ↑ Piwowar, Heather (25 Feb 2020). "Overview". Unpaywall. Archived from the original on 9 August 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
  28. ↑ Piwowar, Heather (14 Jan 2020). "Description of data fields". Unpaywall. Archived from the original on 9 August 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
  29. ↑ Piwowar, Heather (8 Jan 2020). "Cost Effectiveness (NCPPU)". Unpaywall. Archived from the original on 9 August 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
  30. ↑ 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.
  31. ↑ Pritting, Shannon (April 7, 2020). "Elsevier Update". SUNY Libraries Consortium. Archived from the original on 2020-04-18. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
  32. ↑ "OpenAlex" . Retrieved 2022-01-16.
  33. ↑ Piwowar, Heather (2022-01-06). "OpenAlex launch!". OurResearch blog.
  34. ↑ Singh Chawla, Dalmeet (2022-01-24). "Massive open index of scholarly papers launches". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-00138-y. PMID   35075274. S2CID   246278314.
  35. ↑ "Next Steps for Microsoft Academic - Expanding into New Horizons". Microsoft Research. 4 May 2021. Retrieved 2021-05-28.
  36. ↑ "Fossil-record bias and huge research database". Nature. 601 (7893): 303. 2022-01-20. Bibcode:2022Natur.601..303.. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-00103-9. ISSN   0028-0836. S2CID   256820124.
  37. ↑ 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

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