A Vancouver non-profit provides a massive free index of 200 million research documents

OurResearch, a Vancouver-based non-profit, has launched a free online index of more than 200 million scientific research documents.

OpenAlex, which came online on Jan. 3, is named after the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt. The database was created to replace Microsoft Academic Graph, a similar open-access service that ceased operating at the end of 2021.

“We thought the world needed a truly open index of the global research system,” said OpenResearch co-founder Jason Priem.

The lack of public access to scientific data conducted by publicly funded institutions has been the target of criticism in Canada and other countries, and some experts argue that open science arrangements would speed up the pace of innovation. In 2020, Canada’s chief science advisor, Dr. Mona Nemer, introduced a Roadmap for Open Science that aims to make Canadian science open to all to maximize “the country’s well-being, health and economy.”

The roadmap defines open science as the practice of making scientific inputs, outputs and processes freely available to all with minimal restrictions.

Plans to launch online search engine

OpenAlex is now accessible through an application programming interface, or API, at OpenAlex.org. It can perform searches but requires the user to be more tech-savvy than the average person. The company plans to launch a web-based search-engine interface at ExploreOpenAlex.org this month that will be more accessible, Priem says.

“It will allow anyone to access, search and export the hundreds of millions of records in OpenAlex, even without [having] any technical expertise," he said.

Priem said OpenAlex's users include the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Singapore Management University and Overton, a U.K.-based firm that tracks research cited in policy documents.

OpenAlex taps into the former records of Microsoft Academic Graph and other services that link citations, such as Crossref, to allow users to access publications.

Priem and OurResearch’s other co-founder, Dr. Heather Piwowar, PhD, created OpenAlex with a portion of funds from a US $4.5-million grant provided to the company by the U.K.-based charity Arcadia Fund. The fund was founded in 2001 by the husband-and-wife team of Dr. Lisbet Rausing, PhD, and Dr. Peter Baldwin, PhD.

Arcadia aims to preserve and protect endangered culture and nature and promote knowledge sharing through open access. OpenAlex data hosting and transfer fees are covered through Amazon Web Services’ open data sponsorship program, said Priem.

Work began at hackathon

Priem and Piwowar, who is originally from Vancouver, say they believe that research progresses more efficiently and effectively when it is open.

Priem, previously a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a web designer, and a middle school language arts and media teacher, coined the term "altmetrics," which are metrics and qualitative data obtained from Web-based sources that complement traditional citation-based metrics.

Piwowar holds a doctorate in biomedical informatics from the University of Pittsburgh and served as a post-doctoral research associate at the U.S. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESC), where her work focused on the National Science Foundation’s DataOne cyberinfrastructure project and the NESC’s Dryad international open access data repository.

OpenAlex is one of several OA projects that that the pair have developed over the past decade and now fall under OurResearch’s umbrella. Priem and Piwowar started working together at an open hackathon in 2011. (At a hackathon, programmers collaborate on a project for a short period of time,  sometimes over the course of 24 hours or a weekend.)

At the hackathon, they developed the website Impactstory, which becaome the basis for OurResearch in 2017 and now OpenAlex. They also created Unsub, which is designed to help libraries replace expensive academic journal subscriptions with smaller, less expensive custom collections.

OurResearch may also offer a premium paid version of OpenAlex to allow for ultra-quick searches while continuing to offer a free service.

“We're looking into this closely,” Priem said.

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