FORCE2018

This session is an inferno of engagement! We’re prioritizing audience participation, and we’ll be describing a project all about getting the whole world engaged in the peer-reviewed literature. We’ll start with audience members pairing up: one person (with a laptop) will act out a persona searching for open, comprehensible, peer-reviewed resources (personas might include a physical therapist, an amature astronamer, a schoolteacher, etc), while the other observes and takes notes. The audience will come together to highlight problems with the current search and access model. Then we’ll move into a discussion of “OpenAlex,” a newly-launched (right before FORCE), free, open-source search engine created to solve these problems. OpenAlex is built on the 17M OA resources in the Unpaywall database. It supports a search experience tailored to non-academic users, by offering a simple clean interface, search suggestions, jargon translation, multiple languages, and--most importantly--a corpus that’s 100% free to read by everyone. We’ll wrap up by working with the audience to help plan the direction of OpenAlex as it moves toward wider release.

COI Statement: OpenAlex is a free, open-source project of the nonprofit Impactstory, of which the presenters are cofounders.