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 April 2025, OpenAlex contained more than 250 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 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. 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.
OpenAlex competes with commercial databases such as Clarivate's Web of Science or Elsevier's Scopus. An open version of the Leiden University Ranking has been published based on OpenAlex database. Sorbonne University in France has withdrawn from the Web of Science database and started cooperation with the OpenAlex database. In addition, the French Higher Education and the Ministry of Science have committed to a multi-year collaboration aimed at developing the OpenAlex database. In Finland, CSC, together with the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Research Council of Finland, is preparing OpenAlex data for the Vipunen service. The plan is to produce impact indicators for Finnish research organizations based on OpenAlex data during 2025, similar to those available based on the Web of Science data.
References:
CWTS Development. Introducing the Leiden Ranking Open Edition. Published January 30th, 2024. https://www.leidenmadtrics.nl/articles/introducing-the-leiden-ranking-open-edition
Sorbonne University. Sorbonne University unsubscribes from the Web of Science. Published December 8th, 2023. https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/news/sorbonne-university-unsubscribes-web-science
OpenAlex API documentation: https://docs.openalex.org/ [Cited 3.8.2023]
Ouvrir la science! French Ministry of Higher Education and Research partners with OpenAlex to develop a fully open bibliographic tool. Published February 15th, 2024. https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/french-ministry-of-higher-education-and-research-partners-with-openalex-to-develop-a-fully-open-bibliographic-tool/
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
* https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=authorships.institutions.country_code:FI