OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a

nonprofit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

that creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and

research Research is creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge. It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness to ...

ers. The organization follows open practices with their data (to the extent allowed by providers' terms of service), code, and governance. OurResearch is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

, and the Arcadia Fund.

Services

ImpactStory

ImpactStory is the first

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

, web-based tool released by OurResearch. It provides

altmetrics In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics (stands for "alternative metrics") are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and H-index, ''h ...

to help researchers measure the impacts of their research outputs including journal articles, blog posts, datasets, and software. 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 GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

is common, ImpactStory would tell that the repository is in the 95th percentile of all GitHub repositories created that year. The metrics provided by ImpactStory can be used by researchers who want to know how many times their work has been downloaded and shared, 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'', is a

browser extension A browser extension is a software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow users to install a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and st ...

which finds legal free versions of (paywalled) scholarly articles. In July 2018, Unpaywall was reported to provide free access to 20 million articles, which accounts for about 47% of the articles that people search for with Unpaywall. As of 2024, Unpaywall claims to provide access to 49 million free articles. It further states that "Unpaywall users read 52% of research papers for free". In June 2017, it was integrated into

Web of Science The Web of Science (WoS; previously known as Web of Knowledge) is a paid-access platform that provides (typically via the internet) access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedi ...

, and in July 2018,

Elsevier Elsevier ( ) is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell (journal), Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, ...

announced plans the same month to integrate the service into the

Scopus Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004. The ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is c ...

search engine.

GetTheResearch.org

In 2019, GetTheResearch.org was announced as a search engine for

open access 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 (according to the 2001 de ...

content found by Unpaywall, with

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

features to facilitate

discoverability Discoverability is the degree to which something, especially a piece of content or information, can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system. Discoverability is a concern in library and information science, many aspects ...

Unsub

Unsub, previously Unpaywall Journals, was launched in 2019 as a

data analysis Data analysis is the process of inspecting, Data cleansing, cleansing, Data transformation, transforming, and Data modeling, modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Da ...

tool for libraries to estimate the actual cost and value of their subscriptions. The tool reduces

information asymmetry In contract theory, mechanism design, and economics, an information asymmetry is a situation where one party has more or better information than the other. Information asymmetry creates an imbalance of power in transactions, which can sometimes c ...

in negotiations over subscriptions with publishers: in its paid tailored version, it allows to merge Unpaywall data about

status and expected evolution in 5 years, article processing charges, usage statistics and the libraries' own parameters (such as the cost of interlibrary loans ) to calculate various indicators including the cost effectiveness or net cost per use 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

, which was replaced by a subscription to 248 titles, allowing expected savings of 50–70% over the baseline, or 5 to 7 million dollars per year.

OpenAlex

OpenAlex is an open catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, and more. OpenAlex launched in January 2022 with a free API and data snapshot. 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. It is considered an alternative to the Microsoft Academic Graph, which retired on December 31, 2021. 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.

References

External links

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Unpaywall
Non-profit organizations based in Vancouver Academic publishing Internet properties established in 2011 {{DEFAULTSORT:OurResearch