Our projects

Ever since our start at an all-night hackathon ten years ago, we've loved making stuff--stuff that's open, and stuff that helps further the cause of universal Open Science. Since then, we've made a lot of stuff--some pretty successful, some less so. But we've learned from it all, and we're glad to still be here, doing our bit as best we can.

This page lists our major projects. Most of them are still ongoing, although a few were one-off grant-funded projects that have now concluded. Naturally, the source code and datasets behind all these tools are fully open. The grant applications and reports for these projects are published on Open Grants. If you're interested in learning more about any of these projects, click through to their respective websites, which generally have a lot more info.

An open and comprehensive catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, and more.
Goal: Make the global research system—one of humankind's most beautiful creations—available to everyone, everywhere.
Funded by: Arcadia, Premium subscriptions
Active: 2021–present
Read more:
  • "Massive open index of scholarly papers launches" in Nature
  • "Sorbonne’s embrace of free research platform shakes up academic publishing" in Financial Times
  • "What they're doing is invaluable and has no replacement" in OpenAlex testimonials
A data dashboard to help libraries cancel subscription journal Big Deals.
Goal: Make toll-access publishing financially unsustainable.
Funded by: Library partners, Arcadia
Active: 2019–present
Read more:
  • "This tool is saving universities millions of dollars in journal subscriptions" in Science
  • "Taking a big bite out of the Big Deal" in The Scholarly Kitchen
  • "Unsub Gives Libraries Powerful Evidence to Walk Away from Big Deals" in SPARC news
A free database of open access scholarly articles, with an API and browser extension.
Goal: Integrate open access into scholarly reading workflows.
Funded by: Commercial service agreements with users including Clarivate Analytics, Elsevier, Digital Science, OCLC, ProQuest, and others.
Active: 2016–present
Read more:
  • "How Unpaywall is transforming open science" in Nature
  • "Unpaywall scours the web for free versions of scientific papers" in TechCrunch
An academic search engine for people outside academia.
Goal: Leverage Open Access and AI to help nonspecialists find, read, and understand scholarly research.
Funded by: Arcadia
Active: 2018–present
Read more:
An analytic platform to show the full impact of research software.
Goal: Promote investment in reusable research software by integrating software products into the academic reward system.
Funded by: US National Science Foundation
Active: 2015–2018
Read more:
  • "The Unsung Heroes of Scientific Software" in Nature
A researcher impact profile that highlights the impact of Open Science activities.
Goal: Promote investment in nontraditional research outputs (datasets, code, blogs, etc) by showcasing impact beyond traditional citation.
Funded by: Open Society Foundations, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Individual users
Active: 2011–present
Read more:
An open source of altmetrics data, based on Crossref Event Data.
Goal: Provide open data to support development of fully open scholarly metric toolchains.
Funded by: Public Knowledge Project
Active: 2018–present
Read more:
An easy way for researchers to correctly cite the research software they use.
Goal: Integrate research software products into the academic reward system.
Funded by: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Active: 2015–present
Read more:
  • "Collaborating on a $635k grant to improve credit for research software" in OurResearch blog