OurResearch receives $7.5M grant from Arcadia to establish OpenAlex, a milestone development for Open Science

OurResearch is proud to announce a $7.5M grant from Arcadia, to establish a sustainable and completely open index of the world’s research ecosystem. With this 5-year grant, OurResearch expands their open science ambitions to replace paywalled knowledge graphs with OpenAlex.

Researchers, funders, and organizations around the world rely on scientific knowledge graphs to find, perform, and manage their research. For decades, only paywalled proprietary systems have provided this information and they have become unaffordable (costing libraries $1B annually); uninclusive (systematically excluding works from some fields and geographies); and unavailable (even paid subscribers are limited in their use of the data).

OpenAlex indexes more than twice as many scholarly works as the leading proprietary products and the entirety of the knowledge graph and its source code are openly licensed and freely available through data snapshots, an easy to use API, and a nascent user interface.

OurResearch has a decade of sustained experience developing tools that advance open science. Funds from Arcadia will fuel the development needed to establish OpenAlex as the go-to scientific knowledge graph for researchers and organizations around the world. Long-term sustainability of OpenAlex will be achieved through value-add premium services.

Development of OpenAlex started only two years ago and it already serves 115M API calls per month; underlies a major university ranking; is displacing proprietary products at Universities; and has established partnerships with national governments. We are excited by these early successes of OpenAlex and its promise to revolutionize scholarly communication and democratize the world’s research.

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OurResearch is a nonprofit that builds tools to help accelerate the transition to universal Open Science. Started at a hackathon in 2011, they remain committed to creating open, sustainable research infrastructure that solves real-world problems, like Unpaywall and Unsub.

Arcadia is a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge. Since 2002 Arcadia has awarded more than $1 billion to organizations around the world.

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