{"id":743605,"date":"2021-05-04T09:55:10","date_gmt":"2021-05-04T16:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-blog-post&p=743605"},"modified":"2021-06-24T11:45:06","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T18:45:06","slug":"microsoft-academic-to-expand-horizons-with-community-driven-approach","status":"publish","type":"msr-blog-post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/articles\/microsoft-academic-to-expand-horizons-with-community-driven-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"Next Steps for Microsoft Academic – Expanding into New Horizons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note, June 4, 2021 –<\/strong> the post has been updated with a more extensive FAQ to provide more details on the changes announced May 4.<\/em><\/p>\n

For over seven years, Microsoft Research has been proud to have one of its AI research projects contribute to the open exchange of knowledge within the research community. We are now evolving our focus to explore how we can advance these AI technologies in Microsoft 365 to empower every person and organization to derive valuable insights from their content.<\/p>\n

We remain confident in open and community-driven alternatives to MAS and are pleased to see the recent momentum across the academic ecosystem. Many of our open-source machine learning algorithms<\/a> and annotated data repositories<\/a> are available to the community today, and we will continue to provide guidance to key partners throughout this transition.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Academic has been on a mission to explore new ways to empower researchers and research organizations to achieve more. The research project is characterized by two sets of technologies: one that reads all the Bing-indexed web pages and organizes the most up-to-date academic knowledge into a knowledge base called Microsoft Academic Graph<\/a> (MAG), and the other that performs semantic reasoning and inference to serve that knowledge through the Microsoft Academic search website<\/a>\u00a0and API<\/a>. We are proud that these data and web services have been found useful in numerous research projects around the world, and excited to see more community-driven, public efforts emerge.<\/p>\n

One question that we are asked frequently, though, is how the technologies powering Microsoft Academic can be used by institutions outside of academia to make organizational knowledge more discoverable and accessible. Over the years, we have openly shared some of the building blocks, such as the language<\/a> and network similarity packages<\/a>, and the core search engine MAKES<\/a>. \u00a0With the continued progress in data access, we believe now is the right time to fully explore opportunities to extend this technology to new industries and transition to community approaches for academic research.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Research will continue to support the automated AI agents powering Microsoft Academic services through the end of calendar year 2021. During this time, we encourage existing Microsoft Academic users to begin transitioning to other equivalent services. Below are just a few of the many great options available to the community.<\/p>\n