OurResearch
American nonprofit organization
OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization that creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data (to the extent allowed by providers' terms of service), code, and governance. OurResearch is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Arcadia Fund.
Services
ImpactStory
ImpactStory is the first open source, web-based tool released by OurResearch. It provides altmetrics to help researchers measure the impacts of their research outputs including journal articles, blog posts, datasets, and software. This aims to change the focus of the scholarly reward system to value and encourage web-native scholarship.
It provides context to its metrics so that they are meaningful without knowledge of the specific dataset: for example, instead of letting the reader guess whether having five forks on GitHub is common, ImpactStory would tell that the repository is in the 95th percentile of all GitHub repositories created that year.
The metrics provided by ImpactStory can be used by researchers who want to know how many times their work has been downloaded and shared, and also research funders who are interested in the impact of research beyond only considering citations to journal articles.
Unpaywall
Unpaywall, begun as an interface for oaDOI.org, is a browser extension which finds legal free versions of (paywalled) scholarly articles. In July 2018, Unpaywall was reported to provide free access to 20 million articles, which accounts for about 47% of the articles that people search for with Unpaywall.
“OurResearch” enters the record as american nonprofit organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what OurResearch, American and nonprofit can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“OurResearch” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, OurResearch, American and nonprofit provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16996711. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2018.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “OurResearch”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow OurResearch primary sources, OurResearch archive and OurResearch research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “OurResearch”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “OurResearch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.