# OpenAlex OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of the global scholarly record. It indexes hundreds of millions of scholarly works (papers, books, datasets, theses) along with the authors, institutions, sources (journals, repositories), publishers, funders, and topics that connect them. It was built to replace Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), which was discontinued in 2021. OpenAlex is operated by [OurResearch](https://github.com/ourresearch), a US-based nonprofit (the same team behind [Unpaywall](https://unpaywall.org)). Main features: - Fully open data — CC0 license, bulk downloads available (snapshot + incremental updates) - Free REST API with generous rate limits (higher limits via the free "polite pool" with an email) - Web interface for search and exploration - Covers 240M+ works with rich metadata — citations, abstracts, open access status, concepts/topics, institutional affiliations - Entities are interlinked (author → institution → works → citations → topics), enabling graph-style queries - ORCID and ROR integration for author and institution identifiers - Derived products available: OpenAlex Works, Authors, Sources, Institutions, Topics, Publishers, Funders Common uses: - Powering literature discovery and research tools (alternative to arXiv, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, Dimensions, Scopus, Web of Science) - Bibliometric and scientometric analysis - Tracking open access adoption and research impact - Building citation graphs and recommendation systems ## References - Official Website: https://openalex.org/ - Documentation: https://help.openalex.org/ - Blog: https://blog.openalex.org/ - GitHub (OurResearch): https://github.com/ourresearch ## Related - [[Open Source]]