About Our Research:
OurResearch, a not-for-profit based in North Carolina, has been supporting the growth of open science and Open Access research for a decade. The team are passionate advocates of improving the openness and accessibility of academic research for everyone.
With this in mind they developed three main products including:
- Unpaywall Data Feed – the gold standard for discovering OA tracking the status and location of over 145 million academic articles of which 30 million and growing are OA.
- Unsub – a data analytics tool that helps post-secondary institutions better manage and forecast their academic journal spend.
- OpenAlex – this is the newest product, launched in 2023 and is the world’s largest free and open scientific knowledge graph providing bibliometric metadata on 265 million academic works and growing. This data comprises everything from author, title, institution, funder information, affiliations, citations, concepts and much more.
OurResearch’s core focus going forward is going to be evangelizing and commercializing OpenAlex with the goal to disrupt the market, give people and companies anopen and transparent choice while ensuring it is sustainable and can pay for itself.
Business Problem:
With the importance of OpenAlex and the global potential it is essential to begin to drive sustainable revenues now as the grant that was successfully won will only last 5 years. The belief here is that a “freemium” model will have the best chance of success. This model ensures that for most people, OpenAlex remains free to use by anyone in the world. Then for those that require enhanced services, they can pay a Premium fee to get these. It was decided that the Premium paid for services would include:
- Priority support
- A higher API call threshold daily and per second
- A specially minted key opening up some key timeliness filters that would help commercial users get the most out of OpenAlex
In Year 1, a goal was set to hit a sales revenue target of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Our Solution:
Utilizing VA Partners Part-Time Sales services, a sales strategy was developed and executed including:
- Engaging in sales and customer outreach to generate sales of OpenAlex Premium
- Supporting the Licensing negotiations and close of new OpenAlex Premium customers
- Conducting outbound sales activities targeting institutions, governments to introduce them to OpenAlex
The Results:
In 2024, VA Partners was able to assist the OurResearch team in achieving OpenAlex sales exceeding 25% off the annual first year target. VA Partners will continue to work with the OurResearch team in driving sales of OpenAlex with the goal of reaching sustainability in 4 years.