OpenAlex is an open catalog of publications, authors, journals, institutions, concepts, and the connections between them. It was released in 2022 to replace the discontinued Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). OpenAlex is a project by the non-profit OurResearch, funded by Arcadia — a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
In August 2023, OpenAlex contained more than 240 million works such as publications, books, datasets, theses. Approximately 525,000 works contained at least one author with a Finnish affiliation*. OpenAlex's data sources are e.g. MAG, Crossref, ORCID, ROR, DOAJ, Unpaywall, Pubmed, ISSN International Centre, arXiv and Zenodo.
The data are available either as a downloadable snapshot or through a machine-readable interface. The users of the free version can make 10,000 requests to the interface per day, and the data snapshot is updated monthly. OpenAlex also recently released a paid Premium service, which offers unlimited number of calls to the API.
OpenAlex's data enable network analyses between concepts, authors and citations, as well as analyses of the most cited researchers and publications, for example using the VOSViewer tool. OpenAlex does not contain direct information of the field of science. However, for almost all publications, at least one concept describing the work has been created with the help of a machine learning algorithm. In total, OpenAlex contains about 65,000 hierarchical concepts. OpenAlex also stores information on the open access status of publications and the number of citations.
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