About ScienceEcosystem

Scientific knowledge belongs to everyone. ScienceEcosystem is an open platform for discovering research, understanding researcher impact, and evaluating journals — built on public data, free to use, and governed to stay that way.

Why this exists

Science is produced by researchers, funded by the public, and reviewed by peers. Yet the results are locked away by publishers who had no part in creating them. The tools used to evaluate journals and researchers are owned by companies that sell access back to the very institutions that produced the science.

This is not an accident. It is a system that has been commercially optimised over decades at the expense of the thing it was supposed to serve: knowledge that belongs to all of us.

ScienceEcosystem starts from a different premise. Scientific knowledge is a public good. It should be openly accessible, transparently evaluated, and preserved in a way that keeps it useful and verifiable — not just today, but across generations. Everything built here uses public data, stays free to use, and is governed to stay independent.

What you can do today

Data linking — connecting a paper to the dataset or code that produced it — is in progress. It works for a subset of papers where OpenAlex has that information, but it is not reliable enough yet to be a headline feature.

Our open metrics

Science has long relied on proprietary metrics — Impact Factors sold by Clarivate, citation counts locked in Scopus or Web of Science, h-indexes that vary depending on which database you use. ScienceEcosystem introduces three transparent alternatives, computed entirely from open public data and fully reproducible by anyone.

Journal Trust Index (JTI)

The JTI is a 0–100 score for journals, designed as an open alternative to the proprietary Impact Factor. It is computed from OpenAlex data across four dimensions:

Grades run from Excellent (85+) through Good, Fair, Limited, to Poor (<30). No journal currently scores 100/100 — that would require DOAJ verification, extraordinary citation impact, and a large body of work. That's a meaningful fact about where open science currently stands.

The formula is fully open: JTI = Openness + Recognition + Scale + Integrity. Anyone can reproduce it from OpenAlex's public API.

Publication Quality Score

Each paper page shows a 0–100% quality score combining three signals:

This score reflects the credibility of the publication venue and the accessibility of the work — not whether the science inside is correct. It is shown alongside integrity checks (PubPeer, Retraction Watch, predatory journal detection) so readers can form their own judgement.

Open Science Portfolio

On every researcher profile, ScienceEcosystem computes a career-level view of a researcher's commitment to open science:

A researcher with 10,000 citations but 0% open access looks different from one with 1,000 citations and 80% open access. Both profiles are valuable; both should be visible. Existing tools show only the first.

All three metrics are recomputed live from OpenAlex data. No proprietary database subscriptions required.

Browser extension

The ScienceEcosystem Chrome extension is available on the Chrome Web Store. It detects research papers as you browse journal websites, preprint servers, and academic databases, and lets you save them to your library with one click — without leaving the page.

Add to Chrome — free

Cite anywhere — free, no plugin required

Every paper in your library can be exported as BibTeX (.bib) or RIS, either one at a time from the "Cite" button on a paper, or as a single file for your whole library via the ↓ Export .bib button on the library page. That one file is all you need to cite ScienceEcosystem papers from a text editor or Word — no paid Zotero/EndNote plugin required.

Positron / VS Code → Word, PDF, or HTML

The free Quarto extension for VS Code and Positron (built in to Positron, installable in VS Code) renders citations from a .bib file using any CSL citation style — APA, Vancouver, Nature, and thousands more from Zotero's style repository.

  1. Export your library as library.bib from the library page and save it next to your manuscript.
  2. Download a .csl style file for your target journal from zotero.org/styles.
  3. In your .qmd or .md file, reference both in the YAML header: 
    ---
title: "My Manuscript"
bibliography: library.bib
csl: apa.csl
---
  4. Cite a paper inline with [@citekey] (the citekey is the part after @article{ in the .bib entry). Quarto inserts the formatted in-text citation and builds the reference list automatically.
  5. Click Render (or run quarto render manuscript.qmd --to docx) to produce a Word document with citations and bibliography already formatted — switching styles is just swapping the .csl file.

This is the same citation pipeline (Pandoc + citeproc) that Zotero's paid Word plugin uses under the hood — Quarto/Pandoc give you it for free, driven by a plain .bib file you fully control.

Want the full picture — project setup, version control, and archiving your data and code on Zenodo so reviewers (and everyone after them) can reproduce your results? See the Open Research Workflow guide: Positron + Quarto + GitHub + Zenodo, from first commit to published DOI.

What's next

Phase 2 and 3 depend on funding and contributors. If you want to help make them happen sooner, get in touch.

See the full roadmap →

Who is building this

Olivier Raven is a PhD student in Ecology at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He started ScienceEcosystem because he kept running into the same friction every researcher hits — paywalled tools, proprietary metrics, no single place to find a paper and its underlying evidence. The project is currently led by Olivier alone, with no formal team and no funding yet.

That is an honest statement of where things are. It is also an invitation: if you are a developer, researcher, designer, or institution who believes open science infrastructure should exist and be free, Olivier is actively looking for contributors and partners. The public strategy document is on the business plan page and the code is on GitHub.

Get involved

Email: info@scienceecosystem.org

Try ScienceEcosystem