OpenAlex is a fully open catalog of the global research system. It's named after the ancient Library of Alexandria and made by the nonprofit OurResearch.
The OpenAlex dataset describes scholarly entities and how those entities are connected to each other. There are five types of entities:
- π Works are papers, books, datasets, etc; they cite other works
- π© Authors are people who create works
- π Venues are journals and repositories that host works
- π« Institutions are universities and other orgs that are affiliated with works (via authors)
- π‘ Concepts tag Works with a topic
Together, these make a huge web (or more technically, heterogeneous directed graph) of hundreds of millions of entities and billions of connections between them all.
You can read more about the entity objects that make up OpenAlex, or about the data more broadly.
OpenAlex data is completely free and open, provided under a CC0 license. There are three ways to actually get the OpenAlex dataset:
- the API
- the website (launching soon), and
- the database snapshot.
For tech support and bug reports, please email us at [email protected]. You can follow us on Twitter at @OpenAlex_org. For announcements and discussion, join the OpenAlex Users newsgroup.
OpenAlex is made with generous support from Arcadiaβa charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
If you use OpenAlex in research, please cite this paper:
Priem, J., Piwowar, H., & Orr, R. (2022). OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts. ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01833