OpenAlex

Name: OpenAlex
Author: OurResearch

In-depth entry

by OurResearch · Data service

Open catalog of the global research system: works, authors, sources, institutions and topics under CC0, served by a REST API, web app and S3 snapshot

Open sourceFreeFreemiumUsage-basedCloudSelf-hostable

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Checked Nov 2, 2026

Overview

OpenAlex is an open bibliographic catalog run by OurResearch, a US non-profit. It indexes on the order of half a billion scholarly works together with linked entities for authors, sources (journals and repositories), institutions, topics, publishers and funders, and it is widely used as the successor data source for projects that depended on the discontinued Microsoft Academic Graph. The data are released under a CC0 public-domain dedication, so they can be reused, redistributed and combined without a personal-use restriction.

Access comes in several forms. The REST API supports filtering, searching, grouping and cursor paging over every entity type; a web application offers the same queries interactively and can translate search strategies written for PubMed, Scopus or Web of Science into OpenAlex's query language. The complete database is published as a snapshot in an S3 bucket (JSON Lines and a second format) that can be downloaded without an AWS account, with merge and deletion logs to keep local copies in sync. A connector for AI assistants and an llms.txt index are also provided.

The business model is "free data, paid services": basic queries work without a key, every free account receives a small daily API usage allowance that resets at midnight UTC, and heavier use is bought as prepaid usage or through annual institutional plans that add larger budgets, support and daily sync. A paid add-on syncs the archive of cached open-access PDFs.

As with any aggregated catalog, author disambiguation, institution matching and topic assignment are algorithmic and contain errors; a curation API lets authors fix their own profiles. The snapshot is several terabytes uncompressed, so local hosting needs substantial storage.

Editorial note on uncertainty. self_hostable refers to downloading and hosting the CC0 snapshot; the API service itself is operated by OurResearch.

Capabilities

REST API over works, authors, sources, institutions, topics, publishers and funders
Filter, search, group_by and cursor paging
Full database snapshot in S3 (JSON Lines) free to download
Open-access status and license metadata per work location
Search-strategy translation from PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and others
Author curation API for correcting profiles
Daily sync and change logs for institutional plans
AI-assistant connector and llms.txt documentation index

Typical workflows

Systematic-review search with reproducible OQL queries
Bibliometric analysis of an institution or field from the snapshot
Enriching a reference list with open-access locations
Feeding a local DuckDB or PostgreSQL warehouse from JSON Lines files

Strengths

CC0 data with no reuse restrictions
Free daily API allowance with a self-serve key
Complete snapshot downloadable without an account
Operated by a non-profit with open-source code

Limitations

API usage beyond the daily free budget is metered
Entity disambiguation is algorithmic and imperfect
Snapshot is very large to host locally
Cursor paging requires an API key

Prerequisites

Free account and API key for sustained use
AWS CLI or S3-compatible client for the snapshot

Who it is for

Scientometrics and research-evaluation teams
Librarians running systematic searches
Developers building scholarly tools

Alternatives & comparison

Crossref covers only DOI-registered content deposited by members while OpenAlex merges Crossref, repositories, ORCID and other sources into one graph; Semantic Scholar offers similar entities but with per-dataset licenses that may be non-commercial, whereas OpenAlex is uniformly CC0. Google Scholar has broader crawl-based coverage but no API or data export.

Connected Papers
Visual literature-exploration tool that builds a similarity graph of papers around a seed paper, with prior and derivative works lists
ProprietaryFreemium
Crossref
Membership organization that registers DOIs for scholarly content and exposes the metadata through a free public REST API, content negotiation and the paid Metadata Plus service
ProprietaryFree
Google Scholar
Free scholarly search engine from Google that indexes articles, theses, books and court opinions with citation counts and author profiles
ProprietaryFree
ORCID
Non-profit registry of persistent researcher identifiers (ORCID iDs) with user-controlled records, Public and Member APIs, OAuth sign-in and an annual CC0 public data file
Open sourceFree
RePEc
Volunteer-run decentralized bibliographic database of economics research, fed by institutional archives and served through IDEAS, EconPapers, the Author Service, CitEc, NEP and MPRA
MixedFree
Semantic Scholar
Free AI-assisted literature search from Ai2 with an Academic Graph API, recommendations and downloadable datasets of papers, authors and citations
ProprietaryFree

Compare OpenAlex with its alternatives →

Sources & verification

Primary sources consulted for this record. Claims are tied to the fields each source supports; the automated link checker re-verifies every URL on a schedule.

Official documentation
OpenAlex Help Center
https://help.openalex.org/
Supports: capabilities, interfaces
checked Nov 1, 2026
Official documentation
Snapshot
https://help.openalex.org/access/snapshot
Supports: data_formats, limitations
checked Nov 1, 2026
Official documentation
Authentication
https://help.openalex.org/api/authentication
Supports: prerequisites, limitations
checked Nov 1, 2026
Official site
OpenAlex: The open catalog to the global research system
https://openalex.org/
Supports: name, summary, description
checked Nov 1, 2026
Pricing page
How OpenAlex pricing works
https://help.openalex.org/access/pricing
Supports: pricing_model, description
States the CC0 license, the free daily allowance, prepaid usage and annual plans
checked Nov 1, 2026
Repository
ourresearch/openalex-api-tutorials
https://github.com/ourresearch/openalex-api-tutorials
Supports: source_model
checked Nov 1, 2026

Confidence: High
Reviewed: Nov 1, 2026
Links: Broken · Nov 2, 2026

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