OpenAlex

Key takeaways

OpenAlex belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect OpenAlex to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of OpenAlex from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

OpenAlex is a bibliographic catalogue of scientific papers, authors and institutions accessible in open access mode, named after the Library of Alexandria. It started operating in January 2022 by OurResearch as a successor of the terminated Microsoft Academic Graph. OpenAlex competes with commercial products such as Clarivate's Web of Science or Elsevier's Scopus, and is complemented by bibliometrics tools and an API. OpenAlex is challenging Web of Science and Scopus as a free, open-source research index, and it already covers over 250 million scholarly works.

History On 31 December 2021, the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) database stopped being updated. The non-profit organization OurResearch proposed the creation of an open access bibliographic database, named OpenAlex, with the ambition of providing a fully open catalogue for the global research system. OpenAlex was released in January 2022, including information from MAG as well as a free API. Its name is inspired by the Library of Alexandria, which created the first bibliographic catalogue in human history. In September 2023, Leiden University in the Netherlands announced that it would now use OpenAlex to establish its research institution ranking for 2024. In December 2023, the Sorbonne University announced that it was deregistering from Scopus in favor of OpenAlex. In 2024, the French 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 65,000 Wikidata 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 initiative Arcadia, with the goal of making OpenAlex a real, open alternative to commercial solutions. In June 2024 a paper got wider audience when a team of researchers found fabricated metadata entered into the Crossref database, which is also sourced by OpenAlex. Metadata in the reported examples does not contain the real citations any more, but made up citations.

Uses 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 on DOAJ data as well as Unpaywall 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 the sustainable development goals defined by the United Nations. It also uses information from Crossref and ORCID. In 2024 the API had a usage volume of 115 million monthly queries. A 2024 study shows that OpenAlex is particularly good at indexing Diamond 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.

SemOpenAlex SemOpenAlex is an RDF knowledge graph derived from OpenAlex. It was introduced at the International Semantic Web Conference in 2023 and represents OpenAlex metadata as more than 26 billion RDF triples about scholarly works and related entities, including authors, institutions, journals and concepts. The dataset is released under the CC0 licence and is made available through RDF dump files, a SPARQL endpoint, dereferenceable URIs and links to other datasets in the Linked Open Data cloud. It has been described as enabling semantic search, scholarly impact analysis, bibliographic data analysis, recommender systems and benchmarks for RDF query processing and knowledge-graph-based language models.

References

External links Official website

Further reading Céspedes, Lucía; Kozlowski, Diego; Pradier, Carolina; Holmberg Sainte-Marie, Maxime; Shokida, Natsumi Solange; Benz, Pierre; Poitras, Constance; Boudreau Ninkov, Anton; Ebrahimy, Saeideh; Ayeni, Philips; Filali, Sarra; Li, Bing; Larivière, Vincent (June 2025). "Evaluating the linguistic coverage of OpenAlex: An assessment of metadata accuracy and completeness". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 76 (6): 884–895. doi:10.1002/asi.24979. eISSN 1097-4571. Culbert, Jack H.; Hobert, Anne; Jahn, Najko; Haupka, Nick; Schmidt, Marion; Donner, Paul; Mayr, Philipp (April 2025). "Reference coverage analysis of OpenAlex compared to Web of Science and Scopus". Scientometrics. 130 (4): 2475–2492. arXiv:2401.16359. doi:10.1007/s11192-025-05293-3.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with OpenAlex

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what OpenAlex claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to OpenAlex before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about OpenAlex ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of OpenAlex

In research: OpenAlex appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses OpenAlex in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: OpenAlex is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Bibliographic databases and indexes, Online databases, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for OpenAlex outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study OpenAlex in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what OpenAlex means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain OpenAlex out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is OpenAlex in simple terms?

OpenAlex is a bibliographic catalogue of scientific papers, authors and institutions accessible in open access mode, named after the Library of Alexandria. It started operating in January 2022 by OurResearch as a successor of the terminated Microsoft Academic Graph.

Why does OpenAlex matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study OpenAlex?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on OpenAlex.