Last August, I listened to a presentation about OpenAlex hosted (online) by CWTS. OpenAlex provides an “open and comprehensive catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, and more.”

The presenter, Jason Priem, emphasized that OpenAlex tries to be something people can build on, as opposed to Scopus, etc. The project subscribes to open scholarly infrastructure principles.

OpenAlex has web UI, but it is still “under construction.” However, the API is fully functional, and no access token is required to use it. Everything is “maximally permissive” (CC0 and MIT licenses, etc.).

OpenAlex can search by:

• works (DOI, MAG)
• institutions (ROR)
• venues (ISSN)
• authors (ORCID)
• concepts (Wikidata)

They also have full-text search for 50 million works.

The API docs provide a high-level overview. I also got the API to emit this list of search fields:

Valid fields are underscore or hyphenated versions of: abstract.search,
alternate_host_venues.id, alternate_host_venues.license,
alternate_host_venues.version, author.id, author.orcid, authorships.author.id,
authorships.author.orcid, authorships.institutions.country_code,
authorships.institutions.id, authorships.institutions.ror,
authorships.institutions.type, cited_by, cited_by_count, cites, concept.id,
concepts.id, concepts.wikidata, display_name, display_name.search, doi,
from_created_date, from_publication_date, from_updated_date, fulltext.search,
has_abstract, has_doi, has_fulltext, has_oa_accepted_or_published_version,
has_oa_submitted_version, host_venue.id, host_venue.issn, host_venue.publisher,
ids.mag, ids.openalex, ids.pmcid, ids.pmid, institution.id,
institutions.country_code, institutions.id, institutions.ror,
institutions.type, is_oa, is_paratext, is_retracted, journal.id, mag,
oa_status, open_access.is_oa, open_access.oa_status, openalex, openalex_id,
pmcid, pmid, publication_date, publication_year, raw_affiliation_string.search,
referenced_works, related_to, title.search, to_publication_date, type

Example API queries:

• concept “metaverse”: https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=concepts.wikidata:https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2632041
• institution Leiden University: https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=institutions.ror:https://ror.org/027bh9e22

The presenter noted that OpenAlex is not very well suited to study change over time because any changes will probably just reflect changes in the OpenAlex data, not in the scholarly literature.