Our Research, formerly named 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, code, and governance. Our Research is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
ImpactStory
ImpactStory is the first open source, web-based tool released by Our Research. It provides altmetrics 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 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 toknow 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 is a browser extension which finds legal free versions of 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. In June 2017 it was integrated into Web of Science and in July 2018Elsevier announced plans the same month to integrate the service into the Scopussearch engine. In 2019, GetTheResearch was announced as a search engine for open access content found by Unpaywall, with machine learning features to facilitate discoverability.
Unsub
Unsub, previously Unpaywall Journals, was launched in 2019 as a data analysis tool for libraries to estimate the actual cost and value of their subscriptions. 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, article processing charges, usage statistics and the libraries' own parameters to calculate various indicators including the cost effectiveness or net cost per use of a current or planned subscription. 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, allowing expected savings of 50-70 % over the baseline, or 5 to 7,000,000 dollars per year.
