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OurResearch

OurResearch is a founded in 2011 that develops open-source tools and services to promote by improving the accessibility, connectivity, and reusability of scholarly research outputs. Originally established as ImpactStory at a , it initially focused on metrics for research impact beyond traditional citations, such as for diverse outputs like datasets and blog posts. The organization rebranded from "Our Research" to OurResearch in 2021 to distinguish the entity from individual research activities, and in 2025 unified its projects under the OpenAlex name while continuing operations as a nonprofit dedicated to open infrastructure. Key tools include Unpaywall, an open database enabling access to over 20 million freely available versions of scholarly articles by identifying legal open-access copies, which integrates into browsers, , and institutional systems to reduce barriers. Its flagship project, , launched in 2022, serves as a comprehensive, fully open of , indexing more than 250 million works from 250,000 sources, linked to 90 million authors and 100,000 institutions, with enriched metadata on topics, citations, and funding under a CC0 license. OpenAlex differentiates itself through complete openness, including free access, bulk downloads, and , contrasting with proprietary databases by prioritizing coverage of underrepresented areas like non-English publications and Global South . Notable achievements encompass securing a $7.5 million grant from in 2024 to sustain OpenAlex development and handling over 115 million calls monthly, underscoring its role in enabling large-scale analysis and discovery.

History

Founding as ImpactStory

ImpactStory originated as the "total-impact" project, developed during a 24-hour at the Beyond Impact workshop in 2011, an event funded by the . The initiative was spearheaded by Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem, who aimed to create a tool for aggregating diverse online metrics to demonstrate the broader impacts of scholarly work beyond traditional citation counts. Following the hackathon, the founders and collaborators continued development in a hotel room and through spare-time efforts, producing an initial prototype focused on tracking web-based scholarly influence. In early 2012, the project secured £17,000 from the Open Society Foundation via the Beyond Impact initiative, enabling further refinement. By mid-2012, it received a $125,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which supported expansion and formalization. ImpactStory was publicly launched on September 24, 2012, as a refocused and renamed evolution of total-impact, introducing features such as normalized percentile scores, badges for high-impact categories (e.g., "highly saved by scholars" for metrics above the 75th percentile), and categorization of influences by audience (scholars or public) and engagement type (view, discuss, save, cite, recommend). The tool imported data from sources like Google Scholar Profiles, DOIs, PubMed IDs, GitHub, SlideShare, and Dryad to provide researchers with data-driven narratives of their work's reach. By 2013, ImpactStory had incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and obtained major funding, including a two-year $500,000 grant from the Sloan Foundation and $300,000 from the , to sustain operations and develop complementary services. This early phase emphasized open-source principles and — a term coined by Priem in —to advocate for a more holistic evaluation of research impact, prioritizing empirical online signals over journal-based proxies like the .

Rebranding and Organizational Evolution

In July 2019, ImpactStory announced its rebranding to Our Research, reflecting a broadening scope beyond individual researcher metrics to encompass tools and services promoting open , such as Unpaywall and subsequent initiatives like OpenAlex. The organization stated that the former name no longer captured its expanded mission, which had evolved to include open infrastructure for accessibility and reuse of research outputs, necessitating a name that better represented collective efforts in the research ecosystem. This rebranding coincided with organizational maturation as a nonprofit, emphasizing through from foundations like the and partnerships with academic institutions, while maintaining open-source principles. Prior to the change, ImpactStory had already shifted from its origins as Total-Impact—a focused on alternative metrics—in 2012, marking an early evolution toward integrated profiles tracking diverse scholarly influences like citations, mentions, and downloads. Post-rebranding, Our Research streamlined its operations to prioritize scalable, data-driven services, including the development of Unpaywall's browser extension, which by 2019 facilitated over 100 million resolutions monthly, underscoring a from profile-centric tools to systemic enablers. This evolution aligned with growing institutional demands for transparent, non-proprietary alternatives to commercial bibliometric platforms, without altering its core nonprofit governance or funding model reliant on and public grants.

Major Milestones and Expansions

In , following the rebranding, OurResearch expanded its portfolio by launching , a data-driven tool designed to assist libraries in analyzing journal subscription costs against usage and alternatives. This marked a shift toward supporting institutional in scholarly , building on Unpaywall's to provide cost-per-use metrics and cancellation recommendations. A pivotal milestone occurred on January 3, 2022, with the public launch of OpenAlex, an open catalog indexing over 240 million scholarly works, 1.9 billion citations, and related entities like authors and institutions. Developed as a nonprofit alternative to proprietary databases such as Scopus and Web of Science, OpenAlex aggregates data from sources including Microsoft Academic Graph and Crossref under a CC0 license, enabling free API access and bulk downloads to promote global research discoverability. By 2024, it processed 115 million API calls monthly and underpinned university rankings, demonstrating rapid adoption. Sustainability efforts advanced significantly in March 2024 when OurResearch secured a $7.5 million, five-year from to ensure OpenAlex's long-term viability as an open scholarly index. This funding supported infrastructure enhancements and data expansion, addressing the challenges of maintaining a comprehensive, non-commercial database amid growing demand. Additional grants, including $688,000 from the Navigation Fund in November 2024 for user interface improvements, further bolstered operational scalability. In 2025, OurResearch continued expansions with the release of a rewritten codebase, incorporating over 150 million additional works and refining coverage, such as increasing gold OA detection to 19%. These developments reflect the organization's evolution from niche tools to foundational open infrastructure, prioritizing empirical openness over proprietary models.

Organizational Structure and Operations

Mission and Strategic Objectives

OurResearch operates as a with the core mission of making scholarly more open, accessible, and reusable through the and support of open-source and open-data infrastructure. This entails aggregating vast datasets from diverse sources, such as Crossref and Graph, to create comprehensive, freely available catalogs of global scholarship that encompass over 250 million works, including coverage of , non-English languages, and from the Global South. The organization emphasizes universal access, licensing its datasets under CC0 to enable unrestricted reuse without financial or technical barriers. Strategically, OurResearch aims to accelerate the transition to by replacing proprietary or closed systems—such as the discontinued Graph—with sustainable, community-oriented alternatives that prioritize transparency and empirical utility over commercial interests. Key objectives include standardizing across 250,000 sources to link scholarly outputs to 90 million disambiguated authors and 100,000 institutions, while enriching records with citation networks, topics, and alignments to facilitate advanced analysis and discovery. This approach supports causal improvements in research efficiency, as evidenced by features like industry-leading coverage of works (approximately 48 million out of 243 million total) and tools for tracking citations exceeding 1.9 billion. To ensure long-term viability, OurResearch pursues a model, offering core services via and bulk downloads at no cost while monetizing premium features for high-volume users, thereby funding operations without compromising openness. The organization avoids , focusing instead on technical innovation to empower researchers, institutions, and policymakers with verifiable data that counters in traditional . These objectives align with first-principles goals of democratizing knowledge production, prioritizing empirical accessibility over institutional gatekeeping.

Leadership and Key Personnel

Jason Priem co-founded OurResearch in 2011 and serves as its CEO, leading the development of open scholarly infrastructure tools such as OpenAlex and Unpaywall. Priem, who holds a background in from the at Chapel Hill, has emphasized building nonprofit alternatives to proprietary academic databases to promote and research transparency. Heather Piwowar co-founded the organization alongside Priem and previously served as co-CEO, contributing expertise in and research data practices during her tenure. Piwowar stepped down from her operational role at OurResearch in mid-June 2022 to pursue other initiatives, though she remains associated with open scholarship advocacy. OurResearch operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit governed by a that provides strategic oversight and accountability. Current and recent board members have included Ethan White, a quantitative ecologist, and , executive director of , focusing on policies. Past board members include Cameron Neylon, a research data advocate, and John Wilbanks, a pioneer in initiatives.

Funding Sources and Sustainability Model

OurResearch, a 501(c)(3) , primarily secures funding through philanthropic from mission-aligned foundations. In March 2024, it received a $7.5 million from the Arcadia Fund to establish and sustain OpenAlex as a completely open index of global research. In November 2024, the organization was awarded a $688,800 from the Navigation Fund to develop and launch enhancements to the OpenAlex user interface. Historical support includes from the , such as a 2012 proposal for $125,000 to advance open metrics tools. The sustainability model emphasizes earned revenue for day-to-day operations to mitigate risks associated with grant dependency, aligning with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). Revenue streams include subscriptions and service-level agreements, such as premium access to analytics for library cancellation decisions and the Unpaywall Data Feed for institutional integrations. OpenAlex operates on a basis, offering free core access while providing paid premium features. Grants are reserved for time-limited initiatives like product development, with a goal of generating surpluses to build a 12-month . The organization commits to not monetizing data directly, maintaining full openness of datasets like Unpaywall and OpenAlex dumps. This hybrid approach seeks long-term viability amid challenges in securing recurring philanthropic support for operational needs.

Core Services and Tools

ImpactStory

ImpactStory is an open-source created by OurResearch to assist researchers in tracking and disseminating the broader online influence of their work, encompassing such as mentions in , blogs, articles, saves in reference managers, and views of non-journal outputs like datasets or software. Unlike citation-focused tools, it prioritizes diverse engagement signals to highlight web-native impacts, aiming to foster a for open scholarship. Originating from the total-impact project started in 2011, ImpactStory relaunched in September 2012 with enhanced features including and . It queries over a dozen public web APIs—such as those from , , , , and —to aggregate data automatically upon user profile creation, which requires only seconds and supports imports via DOIs, PubMed IDs, or profiles. Impacts are organized by two axes: audience (scholarly peers versus the general public) and engagement depth (viewing, discussing, saving, citing, or recommending), with raw counts contextualized through scores benchmarked against articles for comparability. For instance, having 17 readers in might equate to the 87th to 98th depending on the output type. Badges denote exceptional performance, such as "highly saved by scholars" for metrics above the 75th , enabling concise sharing of achievements. The service supports a range of scholarly products beyond peer-reviewed papers, including blog posts, presentations, and code repositories, and integrates with OurResearch's ecosystem by linking to tools like Unpaywall for access metadata. Funded initially through grants totaling over $900,000 by 2013 from sources including the and , it operates as part of OurResearch's nonprofit mission. As of 2025, ImpactStory remains accessible via profiles.impactstory.org, continuing to provide free profiles despite the organization's 2019 rebranding, though usage has shifted toward complementary services like OpenAlex for broader ecosystem analysis.

Unpaywall

Unpaywall is a and open database developed by OurResearch to facilitate access to legal open-access versions of scholarly articles that would otherwise be paywalled. Launched on April 4, , by founders Priem and Piwowar, it operates as a nonprofit tool that harvests open-access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, indexing approximately 20 million free articles as of its primary database scope. The extension integrates with web browsers such as and , automatically detecting digital object identifiers (DOIs) on publisher pages and providing inline links to freely available full-text versions without circumventing paywalls. Key features include a REST for programmatic access, a Simple Query Tool allowing batch checks of up to 500 DOIs for open-access status, and a subscription-based data feed for institutional users requiring high-volume updates. Unpaywall distinguishes open-access types such as gold (published openly by the publisher), (self-archived), , and (temporarily free but not formally open), enabling users to track compliance with open-access policies. In May 2025, OurResearch released a major update rewriting the underlying infrastructure for 10-fold faster response times (from 500ms to 50ms), improved accuracy in gold open-access detection (rising from 14% to 19% coverage), and integration with the OpenAlex dataset, with a curation at unpaywall.org/fix to address errors. The tool's coverage emphasizes legally sourced content, prioritizing repositories and publisher deposits to avoid , though limitations persist in detecting all green open-access versions due to incomplete from sources. As of 2025, it supports around 800,000 monthly and handles 200 API calls per second, contributing to broader by enabling researchers, librarians, and policymakers to monitor open-access trends without proprietary dependencies. Early adoption led to integrations like Elsevier's in 2018, expanding free article delivery, and it has been credited with increasing reported green open-access rates by up to 38% in some institutional analyses. Funding sustains development through subscriptions, aligning with OurResearch's mission to provide open infrastructure rather than ad- or donation-based models.

OpenAlex

OpenAlex is a free, open-source catalog of scholarly entities comprising works, authors, institutions, sources, concepts, funders, and publishers, developed and maintained by the nonprofit organization OurResearch. It serves as an index of the global research system, enabling users to search, analyze, and connect over 260 million scholarly records as of mid-2025, with data updated daily through an application programming interface (API) and periodic snapshots. Launched in January 2022, OpenAlex emerged as a community-driven successor to the discontinued Microsoft Academic Graph, aiming to provide comprehensive, non-commercial access to interconnected research metadata without paywalls or usage restrictions. The platform aggregates data from diverse sources including Crossref, , the OpenCitations corpus, and national databases, employing algorithms for entity disambiguation and linkage to map relationships such as citations, co-authorships, and institutional affiliations. Key features include advanced search capabilities across metadata fields, support for bulk downloads via monthly snapshots (totaling hundreds of gigabytes), and an that allows filtering by parameters like publication year, author ID, or concept relevance, facilitating integration into research workflows and tools. OpenAlex emphasizes inclusivity by indexing global scholarship, including non-Western publications often underrepresented in proprietary databases like or , though analyses indicate varying coverage discrepancies, such as higher inclusion of Chinese outputs via national repositories but potential gaps in linguistic metadata quality. As of October 2025, OpenAlex encompasses approximately 250-260 million works spanning , , , and theses from over 108,000 institutions and millions of authors, with enhanced reference coverage rivaling or exceeding that of established indices in certain domains. It supports by releasing all code on under permissive licenses, enabling community contributions to improvements like documentation and data processing pipelines. While praised for its breadth and accessibility, OpenAlex faces challenges in data completeness, including incomplete predatory filtering and reliance on upstream source quality, which can introduce biases or errors in entity resolution. Its design prioritizes transparency, with public documentation detailing sourcing methods and limitations to aid user verification.

Unsub

Unsub is a web-based developed by OurResearch to enable libraries to assess the value of subscription packages, with a focus on large "Big Deal" bundles from commercial publishers. It integrates libraries' usage statistics, subscription cost data, citation patterns, and availability to model scenarios for cancellations, individual subscriptions, or shifts toward alternatives. Launched publicly in May 2020, the tool emerged amid rising concerns over escalating costs, which had grown faster than library budgets for decades, prompting libraries to seek data-informed strategies for . The platform's core functionality revolves around an interactive that calculates metrics such as cost-per-use, projected access loss from cancellations, and potential savings from hybrid models combining paid subscriptions with green or gold content. Users upload their institution's usage logs and expenditure details, after which forecasts outcomes like the percentage of prior usage retained via alternative routes—drawing from sources including Crossref, , and DOAJ for open access coverage. For instance, it can simulate retaining 90-95% of access for a fraction of Big Deal costs by prioritizing high-usage titles, as demonstrated in analyses for multi-campus systems where $2 million annually secured immediate access to over 10,000 journals across 64 campuses, compared to broader bundles costing far more. Unsub's methodology emphasizes empirical forecasting over simplistic cost-cutting, incorporating variables like embargo periods, hybrid article fees, and efficacy to avoid overestimating open access substitutes. Parts of the underlying code, including , are via repositories, allowing inspection and customization, though proprietary elements support the hosted service model. tiers, updated in August 2020, scale by institution size and use, starting low for smaller libraries to promote equitable access—reflecting OurResearch's nonprofit commitment to sustainability without . Empirical applications have shown Unsub aiding serials review processes, with libraries reporting informed negotiations leading to deal restructurings or exits; for example, it has highlighted scenarios where 80% of usage concentrates in 20% of titles, enabling targeted renewals. Limitations include reliance on user-provided data quality and assumptions about future growth, which may undervalue niche or low-usage journals if not adjusted manually. Overall, it positions libraries to leverage granular evidence against opaque publisher , fostering greater in scholarly .

GetTheResearch.org

GetTheResearch.org is an open-access search platform developed by OurResearch to facilitate public discovery and comprehension of peer-reviewed research papers. Launched in beta form in late 2018 following an $850,000 grant from Arcadia—a charitable fund established by Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin—the tool targets non-experts by leveraging artificial intelligence to simplify access to scholarly literature. It draws primarily from Unpaywall's database of open-access articles, which numbered approximately 20 million at the time of announcement, enabling free retrieval of full texts where available. The platform's core functionality centers on keyword-based searches for topics ranging from public health queries like "" to everyday interests such as "chocolate," prioritizing peer-reviewed content from academic journals. In its initial release, it specializes in biology and medicine, indexing papers cataloged in , though it incorporates research of various study designs and plans future expansions to broader disciplines. AI features include jargon annotations, categorization of evidence strength (e.g., distinguishing case studies from meta-analyses), and generated visuals sourced from to aid interpretation; users can also subscribe to email alerts for newly published articles matching their queries. An supports programmatic access, aligning with OurResearch's emphasis on reusable infrastructure. While designed to democratize scientific knowledge, the tool includes disclaimers on AI limitations, noting potential inaccuracies, errors, or unintended offensive content in annotations and images, with ongoing improvements to reliability. Mobile compatibility remains restricted, and it provides supplementary guides for evaluating scientific papers, such as assessing and hierarchies. Funded through philanthropic support rather than subscriptions or ads, GetTheResearch.org complements OurResearch's ecosystem by extending Unpaywall's open-access detection to user-friendly search and explanation layers, though its biomedicine focus and early-stage constrain comprehensive coverage across all fields.

Technical Foundations

Data Sourcing and Indexing Methods

OurResearch aggregates scholarly and (OA) content through a combination of public APIs, direct harvesting from repositories, and ingestion from large-scale databases, enabling the construction of open indexes like OpenAlex and Unpaywall. Primary sources include Crossref for metadata, DataCite for dataset DOIs, for biomedical literature, for French research outputs, and institutional repositories worldwide. Data ingestion emphasizes open licenses and identifiers such as for authors, for institutions, and for , facilitating disambiguation and connectivity across entities like works, authors, and venues. OpenAlex, OurResearch's flagship scholarly catalog, sources works primarily from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) archive alongside real-time feeds from Crossref, DataCite, , and , supplemented by institutional repositories and preprint servers. Indexing involves entity resolution to link over 250 million works to authors, institutions, and sources (e.g., approximately 249,000 journals, conferences, and repositories as of late 2023), using probabilistic matching on identifiers and metadata fields like titles, abstracts, and citations. Updates occur continuously via pulls and , with monthly snapshots released under a CC0 license to support reproducible analysis. Unpaywall employs a approach, harvesting versions directly from over 50,000 journals and repositories—including journals, publications, and disciplinary archives—while querying open indexes like Crossref, DOAJ, and DataCite for license and availability signals. Matching relies on resolution: the system scans publisher pages and repository metadata for legal copies (e.g., from or university servers), flagging , , and with evidence URLs for verification. This results in coverage of over 50 million articles, with data refreshed periodically through automated crawls and partnerships, prioritizing non-paywalled, rights-compliant sources from governments, societies, and institutions. For in tools like ImpactStory, data sourcing draws from providers such as for social mentions and policy citations, for full-text availability, and for reader counts, integrated via APIs and importers from , , and . Indexing focuses on author-centric aggregation, resolving outputs like datasets and software through identifiers to compute impact narratives beyond traditional citations. These methods collectively prioritize openness, with on enabling community audits, though coverage gaps persist in non-Western or non-DOI registered outputs.

Open Infrastructure and API Design

OurResearch commits to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), a framework emphasizing openness in code, data, and governance to foster sustainable scholarly tools that prioritize community benefit over proprietary control. This includes licensing source code under permissive terms like MIT on GitHub repositories, providing free API access without authentication requirements, and offering bulk data dumps under CC0 where legally feasible, while respecting privacy constraints. Their infrastructure avoids dependency on vendor lock-in, with revenue derived from value-added services rather than core data access, aiming for operational surpluses and contingency reserves. Central to this approach is the design of RESTful for tools like OpenAlex and Unpaywall, engineered for high accessibility and scalability. The OpenAlex supports queries across a of over 250 million works, 200 million authors, and related entities, with features such as filtering, , and entity resolution to enable efficient data retrieval for bibliometric analysis and discovery. It imposes rate limits of 100,000 calls per day per user—elevated by including an email parameter—and is documented extensively with code examples in multiple languages, details, and usage guides to lower barriers for developers. Bulk snapshots of the full dataset are released monthly, allowing offline processing without API reliance. Unpaywall's follows a similar open design, delivering on versions for DOIs via simple HTTP requests, integrated into workflows for browsers, databases, and analytics platforms. Updated as of July 2025 with a new codebase for improved data quality and speed, it maintains free access and aligns with POSI by archiving code via Software Heritage for long-term preservation. These APIs collectively promote , as evidenced by integrations with services like and Dimensions, while OurResearch's "born open" philosophy ensures ongoing transparency through public repositories and community feedback channels.

Coverage and Limitations in Data Scope

OpenAlex, OurResearch's flagship open index of scholarly metadata, encompasses over 260 million works, including journal articles, books, theses, datasets, and software, drawn primarily from sources such as Crossref, , and other open repositories. This dataset also catalogs approximately 200 million disambiguated authors, 100,000 institutions, and 260,000 publishing venues, with daily additions reflecting real-time ingestion from over 260,000 sources worldwide. Coverage extends to global scholarly output, with strengths in materials and non-Western publications compared to proprietary databases like , where OpenAlex demonstrates higher representation in emerging regions and disciplines. Unpaywall complements this by providing open access links for more than 50 million articles matched against Crossref s, harvesting from over 50,000 journals and repositories including and . It achieves approximately 50% match rates for articles in and via DOI, enabling detection of legal OA versions across green, gold, and hybrid models. Tools like leverage this data for subscription , covering journal portfolios but limited to institutional usage patterns submitted by libraries. Despite broad scope, OpenAlex exhibits gaps in metadata completeness, particularly for university-published journals and pre-digital era works lacking DOIs, with studies noting incomplete publishing details and underrepresentation in certain linguistic domains after corrections for self-reported language data. Regional discrepancies persist, such as discontinuous coverage of Chinese publications due to reliance on national databases and integration challenges, potentially skewing cross-national analyses. Author disambiguation and abstract availability lag behind proprietary indices (87% vs. 92% in Scopus/Web of Science), while Unpaywall faces risks of misclassifying OA status, such as conflating author-archived versions with final publications. These limitations stem from dependence on open, volunteer-maintained sources like Crossref, which prioritize recent, DOI-assigned content over exhaustive historical or proprietary records, though OurResearch mitigates this through ongoing ingestion and community feedback.

Impact and Empirical Outcomes

Adoption Metrics and Institutional Use

Unpaywall, one of OurResearch's flagship tools, has achieved widespread individual and institutional adoption since its 2017 launch, with its browser extension reaching over 800,000 monthly active users as of 2025. The tool delivers approximately one million open access papers daily to users worldwide, supporting integrations in academic workflows, library systems, and discovery platforms. Institutional libraries leverage Unpaywall data to enhance repository management, identify open access versions for faculty outputs, and integrate free versions into patron-facing services, reducing reliance on paywalled content. OpenAlex, OurResearch's open bibliographic index, processes 115 million calls monthly, reflecting robust usage across research ecosystems. Its monthly user base expanded from 28,000 to 78,000 in 2024, generating 440,000 site visits per month, with adoption by institutions including and integration into three major global university rankings. Governments and universities have increasingly substituted proprietary databases like and with OpenAlex for bibliometric analysis, citing its comprehensive coverage of over 260 million scholarly works. Partnerships, such as with the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, underscore its role in national policies. Unsub, designed for serials cancellation analysis, aids over 100 subscribing libraries in optimizing journal portfolios by providing cost-per-use data and alternatives, as evidenced by its application in high-profile cases like the University of California's 2019 Elsevier negotiations. Collectively, OurResearch tools underpin global monitoring efforts, with Unpaywall integrated into initiatives tracking prevalence across millions of articles. Over 500 scholarly publications reference OpenAlex by mid-2025, indicating growing academic endorsement.

Quantifiable Contributions to Research Accessibility

Unpaywall, a core tool developed by OurResearch, maintains an open database indexing over 54 million free, legal versions of scholarly articles, sourced from more than 50,000 publishers and repositories worldwide. This coverage facilitates immediate access to content, including and routes, with recent enhancements achieving 19% detection of articles, up from 14% previously. Browser extension users encounter free versions for 52% of paywalled papers queried, based on aggregated usage data demonstrating the tool's role in bridging access gaps without relying on unauthorized sources. OpenAlex, OurResearch's comprehensive open index, catalogs over 260 million scholarly works as of late 2024, encompassing journal articles, books, and other outputs, with metadata indicating availability for approximately 23% of entries. It disambiguates 90 million authors and links them to over 100,000 institutions, enabling granular discovery of accessible research across disciplines, including underrepresented areas like non-English publications and the Global South. The platform's handles more than 115 million calls monthly, supporting automated queries that integrate status, full-text links via Unpaywall, and citation networks to streamline retrieval for researchers, libraries, and institutions. These tools collectively amplify accessibility by providing free, programmatic access to and legal full-text pointers, with OpenAlex's 2024 user base exceeding 78,000 monthly and generating 440,000 site visits per month. Integration with services like has expanded coverage by over 150 million works, improving consistency in detection and reducing barriers to empirical verification of publication availability. Empirical logs from Unpaywall queries indicate that nearly half of searched articles yield free versions, correlating with broader trends in growth but grounded in tool-specific harvesting rather than aggregate estimates.

Broader Effects on Scholarly Communication

OurResearch's tools, particularly and OpenAlex, have facilitated a reevaluation of traditional subscription models in , empowering libraries to challenge costly "Big Deal" packages from major publishers. analyzes usage data to forecast the impacts of cancellations, revealing that many institutions can redirect funds to without significant disruptions to researcher access; for example, one identified $2 million in annual savings by subscribing to only 248 high-usage journals across 64 campuses, supplemented by alternative access routes. This data-driven approach has provided leverage in negotiations, contributing to cancellations or offsets in Big Deals and pressuring publishers to address pricing opacity and overbundling. OpenAlex has broadened by democratizing access to bibliographic , indexing over 250 million works from 250,000 sources and linking them to 90 million authors and 100,000 institutions under a CC0 license. This open catalog enhances discoverability of underrepresented scholarship, including non-English languages, , and Global South outputs, enabling more inclusive research evaluations and workflows that bypass proprietary barriers like those in or . Its API and bulk downloads support tools for impact analysis, such as tracking trends and alignments, fostering transparency in how research influence is measured and communicated. Collectively, these initiatives accelerate the decline in closed-access dominance, with data showing reduced reliance on paywalled articles as open alternatives gain traction, thereby reshaping incentives toward sustainable, equitable dissemination models. Empirical studies post-cancellation indicate minimal negative effects on research productivity, underscoring the viability of hybrid systems over entrenched bundles.

Criticisms and Counterarguments

Challenges to Data Accuracy and Completeness

OpenAlex, OurResearch's open , aggregates metadata from sources including Crossref, , and regional indexes, but exhibits inconsistencies in coverage compared to databases like and . For instance, coverage of Chinese publications via the China National Knowledge Infrastructure () fluctuated sharply, rising from 2000–2011 before dropping to near zero by 2016, affecting over 204,000 papers and contrasting with steady growth in indexes. Similar discrepancies appear for and Russian outputs, with OpenAlex initially indexing more but later underperforming. Accuracy issues include frequent misclassification of language metadata, such as 99% of a 100-paper sample from CNKI (2000–2016) erroneously labeled as English despite being in Chinese, contributing to an overall 14.7% inaccuracy rate in sampled works. Author and affiliation data show gaps, with over 60% of articles lacking institutional details and many records truncating beyond the first author, particularly in large collaborations where lists exceeding 100 authors are shortened. These stem partly from source data inheritance and algorithmic disambiguation challenges, limiting reliability for fine-grained bibliometric tasks beyond country-level aggregation. Completeness varies by field: high for core elements like DOIs (100% accuracy in sampled works) and titles (99%), but lower for affiliations (61% overall, dropping to 55% for OpenAlex-exclusive publications), references (45%), and funding acknowledgments (6%). OpenAlex-exclusive content, comprising unique non-proprietary records, fares worse, with 40% missing abstracts and 60% lacking references entirely, though 39% of those missing references exist elsewhere in the database. Regional underrepresentation persists, such as in journals reliant on non-DOI systems like AJOL, despite capturing 98% of AJOL works overall. Unpaywall, OurResearch's open access detection tool integrated into OpenAlex, maintains stable precision in identifying legal versions but has experienced shifts in recall: a 2025 update improved detection for gold while reducing it for green , with 10% of works altering OA status and 5% flipping between open and closed. These changes reflect evolving publisher practices and necessitate ongoing community curation for fixes, as evidenced by deprecated fields and bulk updates. GetTheResearch.org, leveraging OurResearch data for public access, prioritizes -indexed papers in its initial release, inherently limiting completeness across disciplines like social sciences or engineering where PubMed coverage is absent. Broader OurResearch efforts thus inherit source-specific gaps, with metadata quality improving for records overlapping proprietary databases but requiring validation for exclusive or regional content.

Economic Disruptions to Traditional Publishing

, a data analytics dashboard developed by OurResearch, enables academic libraries to assess the value of bundled journal subscriptions—known as "Big Deals"—by integrating usage data, cost-per-use metrics, and projections of post-cancellation access via open access repositories tracked by Unpaywall. This analysis often demonstrates that 80-95% of articles from canceled packages remain discoverable through legal open versions, reducing the perceived necessity of maintaining expensive all-you-can-read subscriptions from publishers like and . A prominent example occurred in 2020 when the (SUNY) system employed to evaluate its package, which cost approximately $35 million annually across 64 campuses. The tool's forecasts indicated sufficient coverage to support cancellation without major access gaps, leading SUNY to exit the deal and redirect savings toward individual high-use titles and initiatives, thereby saving millions in subscription expenditures while preserving researcher productivity. Similar applications have proliferated, with institutions such as the and Norwegian libraries citing in negotiations or outright cancellations of big deals from Wiley and other publishers as of 2022, contributing to "subscription fatigue" amid flat library budgets and publisher price increases averaging 4-6% yearly. These disruptions threaten the revenue stability of traditional publishers, who rely on Big Deals for 50-70% of their subscription income, prompting shifts toward hybrid models emphasizing article processing charges (APCs) that can exceed $5,000 per . Complementing , OpenAlex provides a comprehensive, scholarly index covering over 250 million works as of 2024, serving as an open alternative to proprietary databases like and that publishers monetize through licensing fees. By offering access and citation analytics without cost barriers, OpenAlex diminishes demand for these paid services, which generate ancillary revenue for publishers through institutional sales often bundled with journal access, further eroding the economic of closed ecosystems.

Sustainability and Dependency Risks

OurResearch operates as a reliant on philanthropic grants and donations for its , which introduces vulnerabilities to fluctuations in donor priorities and availability. In March 2024, it secured a $7.5 million grant from spanning five years to support the development and of OpenAlex, its open scholarly , with the explicit goal of transitioning toward through premium value-added services. Additional includes a $688,800 grant from the Navigation Fund in 2024 to enhance OpenAlex's . Despite these commitments, the model's heavy dependence on grants—common among open infrastructure projects—poses risks of operational fragility, as noted in the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), to which OurResearch adheres; POSI highlights that grant-funded entities can face abrupt disruptions if funding lapses, potentially leading to service degradation or cessation without diversified revenue streams. To mitigate long-term financial risks, OurResearch has outlined a emphasizing open-core models, where core data and remain freely accessible, while premium features such as advanced or customized datasets generate revenue. This approach aims to avoid the pitfalls observed in other open projects that collapsed due to unsustainable volunteer-driven maintenance or unresolved funding gaps. However, the efficacy remains unproven, as premium adoption depends on user willingness to pay amid competition from proprietary alternatives like or Dimensions, and any failure to scale could revert reliance to intermittent grants, echoing challenges in initiatives like the Public Library of Science's early struggles with donor dependency. Dependency risks extend to the scholarly community, which increasingly integrates OpenAlex into workflows for , literature discovery, and open-access tracking, potentially creating systemic vulnerabilities. With over 250 million works indexed as of late 2024, disruptions—such as data outages or unresolved quality issues like missing institutional affiliations—could halt evaluations, assessments, and analyses that have shifted toward open alternatives to reduce costs from commercial providers. Although OpenAlex's open-source nature and data dumps enable forking or self-hosting, the effort and expertise required limit practical alternatives for most users, fostering a monopoly in open scholarly ; critics argue this mirrors risks in other centralized open infrastructures, where rapid adoption outpaces redundancy development, amplifying impacts from technical failures or shifts. OurResearch's commitment to POSI principles, including transparent and community involvement, seeks to distribute risks, but empirical outcomes depend on sustained technical robustness and user diversification beyond OpenAlex.

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