OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a

nonprofit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

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, and governance. OurResearch is funded by the

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is an American philanthropic nonprofit organization. It was established in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of General Motors. The Sloan Foundation makes grants to support ...

, the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

, and

Arcadia Fund The Arcadia Fund is a UK charity organization founded by Lisbet Rausing and Professor Peter Baldwin. Established in 2001, the organization provides grants on a worldwide basis focusing on numerous projects outside the UK. The primary focus of t ...

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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

, web-based tool released by ''OurResearch''. It provides

altmetrics 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 i ...

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 In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods eit ...

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

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 small software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and styling of web pa ...

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, 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'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

announced plans the same month to integrate the service into the

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

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 research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre o ...

content found by Unpaywall, with

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

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 a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Data analysis has multiple facets and approaches, en ...

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

information asymmetry In contract theory and economics, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. Information asymmetry creates an imbalance of power in transactions, which ca ...

in negotiations over

subscriptions The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century, and ...

with publishers: in its paid tailored version, it allows to merge

Unpaywall OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization which creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data (to the extent allowed by ...

data about

status and expected evolution in 5 years,

article processing charge 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 a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. ...

s, usage statistics and the libraries' own parameters (such as the cost of

ILL ILL may refer to: * ''I Love Lucy'', a landmark American television sitcom * Illorsuit Heliport (location identifier: ILL), a heliport in Illorsuit, Greenland * Institut Laue–Langevin, an internationally financed scientific facility * Interlibrar ...

) 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 The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led by ...

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 Dec 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 Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain licen ...

, which are algorithmically linked to works using an automated hierarchical multi-tag classifier.

References

External links

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