SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE
EXPLORE +
  • About infoDOCKET
  • Academic Libraries on LJ
  • Research on LJ
  • News on LJ
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Libraries
    • Academic Libraries
    • Government Libraries
    • National Libraries
    • Public Libraries
  • Companies (Publishers/Vendors)
    • EBSCO
    • Elsevier
    • Ex Libris
    • Frontiers
    • Gale
    • PLOS
    • Scholastic
  • New Resources
    • Dashboards
    • Data Files
    • Digital Collections
    • Digital Preservation
    • Interactive Tools
    • Maps
    • Other
    • Podcasts
    • Productivity
  • New Research
    • Conference Presentations
    • Journal Articles
    • Lecture
    • New Issue
    • Reports
  • Topics
    • Archives & Special Collections
    • Associations & Organizations
    • Awards
    • Funding
    • Interviews
    • Jobs
    • Management & Leadership
    • News
    • Patrons & Users
    • Preservation
    • Profiles
    • Publishing
    • Roundup
    • Scholarly Communications
      • Open Access

July 8, 2018 by Gary Price

Research Tools: Arcadia Awards Impactstory (Providers of Unpaywall), Internet Archive, and British Library $850,000 Grant to Build a Free, AI-Powered Search Engine of Open Access Scholarly Articles

July 8, 2018 by Gary Price

UPDATED November 19, 2018 Rick Anderson has posted an interview with Jason Priem from Get The Research (via SK)
—
News just-in from a partnership consisting of Impactstory, Internet Archive, and British Library.

From the News Release (Full Text);

2018-07-08_16-16-15Nonprofit startup Impactstory today announced new funding of $850,000, received as a grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to build a free search engine designed to help the public find, read, and understand peer-reviewed research on any topic.

Impactstory will partner with the Internet Archive and the British Library for the project.

The new search engine will be built on an open index of 20 million open access (OA) scholarly articles, and will incorporate an interface layer using artificial intelligence to annotate, summarize, and link articles using plain language.
The backbone of the new search engine will be Impactstory’s existing database of OA articles, called Unpaywall. Launched late 2016, Unpaywall offers a free Chrome extension now used by 150,000 readers, and a free API that is used in thousands of academic libraries and handles over 1.5 million unique uses daily. Other users include Clarivate Web of Science, Digital Science Dimensions, national science evaluations in the UK, Switzerland, and elsewhere.
However, despite heavy use of the database, most integrations to date have not sought to engage the the general public. Indeed, few projects have met the need for a single, comprehensive search engine for OA aimed at the nonspecialist reader.
“Students, patients, citizen scientists, scholars in the developing world: there are so many who need to find, access, and understand the scholarly literature,” notes Impactstory cofounder Heather Piwowar. “Today there’s a unique opportunity to meet that need, by leveraging two trends: growth in Open Access, and dramatic improvements in AI-powered translation, summarization, and recommendation.”
The future of scholarly publishing does increasingly appear to be Open Access. A 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memo requires US federally-funded research be made Open Access, while in Europe an ambitious mandate requires 100% of European-funded research be OA by 2020. Nearly half of research literature is OA already, and studies show rapid increase in this percentage in recent years.
However, actually getting research literature into the hands of non-specialist readers has remained challenging. “OA literature is scattered all over the place,” observes Jason Priem,
Impactstory’s other co-founder, “and so despite the promise of OA, we haven’t had a place where we can tell lay readers ‘here’s where you can read free, trustworthy research about anything.’ With this new grant, we’re making that place. And we’re adding an AI-powered interface that makes the articles people find more understandable as well.”
[Our emphasis] A beta version of the search engine will be launched in the fall (early adopters can sign up for advance access at http://gettheresearch.org). The beta version will include support for multiple languages, an open API, and integrated altmetrics. Although the focus will be on non-specialist readers, the team will also explore ways to engage scholarly users, particularly those with incomplete subscription access.
2018-07-08_16-24-10
By partnering with established institutions, Impactstory gains experienced collaborators to take on the technical and social challenges of the project. “The Internet Archive and British Library share our passion for helping people access knowledge, and we’re thrilled to be working with them,” says Piwowar.
“At the British Library we believe in making the world’s knowledge available to people from all backgrounds.”, says Torsten Reimer, Head of Research Services. “We are excited to work with Impactstory to make scholarly publications more accessible.”
“The Internet Archive shares Impactstory’s mission of enabling open access to research outputs. Pairing our capacity for archiving at scale with Impactstory’s fantastic discovery and OA services such as Unpaywall promises to enable free, easy access to published knowledge,” says Jefferson Bailey, Director of Web Archiving & Data Services.
Impactstory is a nonprofit with a long history of building tools to make science more open. Their start came at a hackathon in 2011, where Piwowar (then a Duke postdoc) and Priem (a PhD student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) stayed up all night building a prototype website to help scholars learn about their open science impact. Since then they’ve built several production tools including Depsy and Impactstory Profiles. Previous funders include the US National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Open Knowledge International.
Arcadia is a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. It supports charities and scholarly institutions that preserve cultural heritage and the environment. Arcadia also supports projects that promote open access and all of its awards are granted on the condition that any materials produced are made available for free online. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $500 million to projects around the world.

A Quick Comment From infoDOCKET Founder/Editor, Gary Price:
The Unpaywall browser extension, API and other tools and services have made accessing open access material much simpler and faster for many users particularly those with limited or no online research skills.
With this in mind we’re VERY excited to see what Impactstory, Internet Archive, and British Library will release this Fall when the Get the Research “AI-Powered Explanation Engine” goes live. 
We’re also interested to read that the focus is on developing this resource for the general public/nonspecialist reader. Good idea!
The challenge will NOT ONLY developing what you would expect (info retrieval algorithms and AI that work well, user interfaces, etc.) BUT also the marketing and promotion of  Get the Research to the general public which will likely be an equal if not greater challenge than the developing the technology.
For example:

  • Creating general product/name awareness in today’s busy world. A myriad of new products/services competing for awareness.
  • User education (why do I need this product?; what can it do for me?; how does it work? etc.)
  • Changing established user behavior (aka good enough is fine with me, no time to learn something new). 

Stay tuned! We will be following this project very closely.
Mega congratulations to ALL partners! 

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Awards, Data Files, Funding, Interviews, Libraries, News, Open Access, Patrons and Users, Profiles, Publishing

SHARE:

About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.

ADVERTISEMENT

Archives

Job Zone

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Infodocket Posts

Library of Congress Opens New Web Archive Collection Documenting Protests Against Racism & Learn About LC's Black History...

From the Library of Congress (Full Text of Announcement): A new web archive collection from the Library of Congress documents the civil unrest sparked by the police murder of George ...

AI: arXiv Announces New Policy on ChatGPT and Similar Tools

From an arXiv Blog Post: The recent release of AI technology that generates new text has raised serious questions among the research community. For one, “Can ChatGPT be named an ...

ResearchGate and De Gruyter Announce a New Content Syndication Partnership

From a Joint Statement (via De Gruyter): ResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and De Gruyter, an independent academic publisher, have today announced a content syndication partnership that will see ...

EveryLibrary Releases 2022 Annual Report; ARL: Celebrating Black History Month 2023 & More News Headlines

ARL: Celebrating Black History Month 2023 EveryLibrary Releases 2022 Annual Report ||| Full Text Report Germany: DFG Launches Cooperation with the OAPEN Foundation IFLA: Applications for Public Library of the ...

Ithaka S+R Releases "A*CENSUS II: Archives Administrators Survey" Findings

From an Ithaka S+R Blog Post by the Report’s Author, Makala Skinner:  On Tuesday, January 31, we published the A*CENSUS II Archives Administrators Survey findings. The Archives Administrator Survey Report is ...

“Food is a Right: Libraries and Food Justice" (A New White Paper From the Urban Libraries Council)

From the Urban Libraries Council (ULC): The Urban Libraries Council (ULC) announces today the release of its latest white paper, “Food is a Right: Libraries and Food Justice,” which addresses ...

Standards: W3C Re-Launched as a Public-Interest Non-Profit Organization; eLife’s New Model: Open for Submissions; & More News Headlines

Annual Report 2022: Highlights from the Data Curation Network arXiv Announces New Policy on ChatGPT and Similar Tools (via arXiv Blog) COPE in 2023 (via Committee on Publication Ethics) eLife’s ...

Journal Article: "A Free Toolkit to Foster Open Access Agreements"

The article linked to below was today published by Insights. Title A Free Toolkit to Foster Open Access Agreements Authors Alicia Wise Information Power Lorraine Estelle Information Power Source Insights 36 ...

Six Libraries Partner With GPO To Preserve Government Information

From the Government Publishing Office (GPO): Libraries at the University of Montana, the University of Memphis, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville have signed Memorandum of Agreements with the U.S. ...

Michigan: Grand Rapids Public Library Finds Rare Set of 'Magic Lantern' Slides Showing Early Tuskegee Institute

From Fox 17 (Grand Rapids): The folks over at the Grand Rapids Public Library made a fascinating discovery while digging through their massive archives back in March 2021, and are ...

Journal Article: "Knowledge Work in Platform Fact-Checking Partnerships"

The article linked below was recently published by the International Journal of Communication. Title Knowledge Work in Platform Fact-Checking Partnerships Authors Valérie Bélair-Gagnon University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA Rebekah Larsen ...

State Library Looks to Install Book Vending Machines Around North Dakota; A Guide to Communicating With Others: Messaging...

A Guide to Communicating With Others: Messaging Apps (via Privacy International) De Gruyter Acquires Mercury Learning and Information Report by the French Committee for Open Science Working Group on Electronic ...

ADVERTISEMENT

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

Tweets by infoDOCKET

ADVERTISEMENT

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

Primary Sidebar

  • News
  • Reviews+
  • Technology
  • Programs+
  • Design
  • Leadership
  • People
  • COVID-19
  • Advocacy
  • Opinion
  • INFOdocket
  • Job Zone

Reviews+

  • Booklists
  • Prepub Alert
  • Book Pulse
  • Media
  • Readers' Advisory
  • Self-Published Books
  • Review Submissions
  • Review for LJ

Awards

  • Library of the Year
  • Librarian of the Year
  • Movers & Shakers 2022
  • Paralibrarian of the Year
  • Best Small Library
  • Marketer of the Year
  • All Awards Guidelines
  • Community Impact Prize

Resources

  • LJ Index/Star Libraries
  • Research
  • White Papers / Case Studies

Events & PD

  • Online Courses
  • In-Person Events
  • Virtual Events
  • Webcasts
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Media Inquiries
  • Newsletter Sign Up
  • Submit Features/News
  • Data Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Terms of Sale
  • FAQs
  • Careers at MSI


© 2023 Library Journal. All rights reserved.


© 2022 Library Journal. All rights reserved.