Interview


I’ve written at some length about this elsewhere, and I still hold to most of that. Our goal at Our Research is to


accelerate the transition toward universal Open Science. That means we want a world where the default is set to open for all research products, including papers, preprints, datasets, source code, protocols and more. This world isn’t one of openness for


its own sake, but one where all these delightful open products of research can be processed, remixed, distributed, summarised, annotated, text-mined and used by an open ecosystem of automated tools.


Scholars invented the Web for


‘We believe research progress is more efficient and effective when it’s open’


The tool offers three main advantages for libraries over current workflows: • Unsub is more comprehensive. Our model accounts for the effect of OA (green, hybrid, bronze and delayed), Counter downloads, previously- purchased backfile, interlibrary loan, document delivery, faculty citation and authorship patterns, journal readership decay curves, and then shows how that all affects fulfilment rates and costs. It’s just a more complete picture.


• Unsub forecasts the future. Instead of just looking at the current state of a library’s collection, Unsub uses a forecasting model (trained on millions of data points) to simulate the future. Users can experiment to see how their plans will affect costs and fulfilment rates


www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo


for the next five years – it’s kind of like playing SimCity with a serials collection.


• Unsub saves time. For most users, it takes just hours to set up an Unsub profile; they just upload your Counter report, perpetual access status, and price lists. After that, it’s all gravy: Unsub replaces annoying and time- consuming spreadsheet-juggling with a simple UI. By lightening the analytics workload, Unsub gives institutions the ability to take a much deeper look into their options. We’ve had many users tell us that it feels great to walk into negotiations more prepared and data- informed than they’ve ever been.


It’s now been about 18 months since we launched, and we’re used by roughly 400 libraries worldwide, including a lot of the most prominent institutions. That’s a credit to our terrific user


community, which has done a lot to spread the word for us.


What are your hopes for the future of scholarly communications? That’s a great question, but a tough question to answer briefly! In fact,


scholarship. But 25 years later, we still don’t really use it! Or when we do, we use it in simple, unimaginative ways. That’s largely because we just don’t have access to scholarship on the open web – it’s siloed and Balkanised and paywalled by a clumsy swarm of for-profit publishers (as well as, increasingly, for-profit social networks like ResearchGate). The world of ideas is a singular


one – every idea can be viewed in the context of any other idea. The scholarly communication system is the humble substrate of this process, the infrastructure, the subway where all these ideas and data can ride around and get to know one another. Let’s make that subway as well-connected and cheap and easy- to-use as we possibly can. Today’s world is asking a lot from the research community. We owe it to them to build on the best system we can.


Do you have any hobbies or interests you want to tell us about? I really enjoy what we are doing at Our Research... I’m very fortunate that it still feels like a fun hobby, as well as a job. So I spend a lot of time on that. I also like to hit the gym, play volleyball and jiu jitsu (when there’s not a global pandemic on, anyway), relax at the beach, play Dungeons & Dragons, hang out with friends, and of course waste time in front of Netflix :)


Interview by Tim Gillett


June/July 2021 Research Information 17


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