We think that organizations working for Open should be sure that they're being open themselves--with their code and data, and with the details of their operation. We're doing our best to live up to that, and this page is part of that effort. If you've got feedback, drop us a line!
All monetary figures are in US dollars.
We publish all our grant proposals, both the successful ones and the ones that don't get funded. We also publish annual and final grant reports. These are all posted on Open Grants (search for "Piwowar" or "Priem" to find them). As of May 2021, we've submitted 12 grant proposals, or about one a year on average.
Our board members are unpaid volunteers, except for Jason, who is on the board and is paid in his capacity as CEO.
Jason is both CEO and serves as a senior software developer. His annual salaries are equal has varied substantially over the years, from a low of $25,000 to a high of $191,000. This latter figure is his current salary. Historical salaries for Jason and any other employees can be found in our tax records (see below).
For hourly workers (including workers on cloud platforms like Mechanical Turk), we pay a minimum wage of $25/hour.
As a 501(c)3, we're exempt from corporate taxes. However, the law does require that we file a Form 990 to the IRS every year. This is great, because you can look up any 501(c)3 nonprofit's Form 990 and learn lots about their finances. You can find our annual Form 990 filings in many places online; here are all our 990 filings in Nonprofit Explorer by Pro Publica, for example. If you search for our taxes on other sites, you'll probably want to search under "Impactstory;" we changed our name to OurResearch in 2019, but that's a DBA--we're still Impactstory to the government.
"First developed in a 2015 blog post, POSI offers a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organisations and initiatives that support the research community can be run and sustained."source: POSI website
When we read the sixteen POSI principles, we saw right away that they were solidly aligned with our core values of openness, progress, pragmatism, sustainability, and community. We're delighted to see momentum building around these kinds of values, and so we were thrilled to make OurResearch the fifth organization to commit to the POSI principles. We encourage other scholarly communications to do this as well.
The full description of the principles and how we're honoring them is pretty long, so it's outside the scope of this page. You can read Our POSI commitment here.
The first lines of code we ever wrote together, at an all-night hackathon in 2011, were open-source. And as die-hard open-source advocates, that's still our approach. All our projects are open-source from day one, even before they're released.
We license code under the MIT License. The MIT license is a "permissive license," meaning it imposes very few restrictions on downstream use. We're happy that our code has often been reused and repurposed, by both nonprofit and for-profit organizations. You can find the code for all our projects on GitHub.
If OurResearch or GitHub were to become sufficiently evil, this GitHub-hosted code could be removed or re-licensed. So it's important that our code is also held in the Software Heritage archive, maintained outside our control a by third-party nonprofit dedicated to the long-term preservation of its openness.
Sometimes software source code is encumbered by patents. Ours isn't, and it never will be. This is our patent non-assertion covenant: OurResearch confirms it does not currently control any patents, and irrevocably promises not to apply for or attempt to obtain patents in the future.
Our CEO Jason and former co-CEO Heather were both academic researchers before moving to OurResearch full-time, and we still publish research papers. Naturally, we publish only Open Access (OA) papers. We've occasionally published in toll-access journals, but in these cases we've either convinced the publishers to make our articles OA, or taken the green OA road by self-archiving the papers in a repository.
You can see a list of our papers on ORCID (Jason, Heather) or Google Scholar (Jason, Heather); lamentably, the Google ones are more complete.
We make the data behind our projects open. For example, you can download a full dump of the Unpaywall database, all 120M+ rows of it, any time. That data is also available via a public, open API with generous rate limits (100,000 calls per day). More specific details on data dumps and APIs are available on individual project pages.
Much of our data consists of "facts" that have no copyright (see this Crossref blog post for more discussion of this). We can't apply a license to these (nor, appealingly, can anyone else). Where copyright is applicable, though, our data is CC0, "no rights reserved."
We incorporated in North Carolina (USA) in 2012. Here are our Articles of Incorporation and our corporate by-laws. Our IRS EIN (Employer Identification Number) is 46-1599252; here's our IRS form W-9 which is pretty much just a fancy way of sharing that number. We've also got a Canadian business number.
To become a US 501(c)3, we submitted this Form 1023 to the IRS, describing why we think we met the criteria for this type of nonprofit. The IRS thought about it for a while, and then issued us this determination letter, granting us 501(c)3 status.