 | |
| Producer | OurResearch |
|---|---|
| History | 2022; 4 years ago (2022) |
| Coverage | |
| Disciplines | Science, social science, arts, humanities (supports 256 disciplines) |
| Record depth | Citation indexing, author, topic title, subject keywords, abstract, periodical title, author's address, publication year |
| Format coverage | Articles, reviews, editorials, chronologies, abstracts, proceedings (journals and book-based), technical papers |
| Links | |
| Website | openalex.org |
OpenAlex is abibliographic catalogue ofscientific papers, authors and institutions accessible inopen access mode, named after theLibrary of Alexandria. It started operating in January 2022 byOurResearch as a successor of the terminatedMicrosoft Academic Graph. OpenAlex competes with commercial products such asClarivate'sWeb of Science orElsevier'sScopus, and is complemented bybibliometrics tools and anAPI.[1][2]
On 31 December 2021, theMicrosoft Academic Graph (MAG) database stopped being updated.[3][4] The non-profit organizationOurResearch proposed the creation of an open accessbibliographic database, named OpenAlex, with the ambition of providing a fully open catalogue for the global research system.[5] OpenAlex was released in January 2022, including information from MAG as well as a free API.[6] Its name is inspired by theLibrary of Alexandria, which created the first bibliographic catalogue in human history.
In September 2023,Leiden University in theNetherlands announced that it would now use OpenAlex to establish its research institution ranking for 2024.[7] In December 2023, theSorbonne University announced that it was deregistering fromScopus in favor of OpenAlex.[8]
In 2024, theFrench Ministry of Research and Higher Education pledged to contribute financially to the project, considering it "as a crucial open science infrastructure".
By March 2024, OpenAlex included metadata for 209 million works such as journal articles and books; 13 million authors with ambiguous identities; metadata for 124,000 sites hosting works, including journals and online repositories; metadata for 109,000 institutions; and 65,000Wikidata concepts, which are algorithmically linked to works using an automated multi-tag hierarchical classifier. In March of the same year, it announced that they had received a $7.5 million grant from the philanthropic initiativeArcadia, with the goal of making OpenAlex a real, open alternative to commercial solutions.[9]
In June 2024 a paper got wider audience when a team of researchers found fabricated metadata entered into theCrossref database, which is also sourced by OpenAlex. Metadata in the reported examples does not contain the real citations any more, but made up citations.[10][11]
OpenAlex is used by universities to measure the progress of their research teams in terms of publishing publications or meeting sustainable development goals. OpenAlex relies onDOAJ data as well asUnpaywall data to indicate the status (closed or open) and route used for open access (open access in gold, green, bronze or hybrid versions), and in Aurora's requests to qualify the works indexed according to thesustainable development goals defined by theUnited Nations.[12] It also uses information fromCrossref andORCID. In 2024 the API had a usage volume of 115 million monthly queries.
A 2024 study shows that OpenAlex is particularly good at indexingDiamond open access journals, with more than 12,500 indexed titles, including more than 60% of all Diamond OA journals not found in WoS or Scopus.[13]