Explainer · Plain-language
Openalex: Definition, Meaning & Examples | CASRAI
OpenAlex is a fully open, freely accessible bibliographic database of scholarly works, authors, institutions, and journals, launched in January 2022 by OurResearch (formerly Impactstory). It was designed to fill the gap left by the retirement of Microsoft Academic Graph in December 2021 and to provide a genuinely free alternative to subscription-based databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. Its data is released under a CC0 licence.
The step most authors miss
Doing CRediT right? Don’t stop at the statement.
A CRediT statement credits you inside one paper. The recognition CRediT was built for happens when those roles are tied to you, persistently. Sign in with your ORCID — free — and claim your CRediT contributions on casrai.org, the home of the standard. They become a verified, portable part of your identity, not a line that disappears into one PDF.
Free: claim your contributions, then export a journal-ready CRediT statement, schema.org structured data, JATS XML, CSV or BibTeX — and preview your public profile. A membership publishes that profile publicly and verifies the journals you serve.
Origins and data sources
OpenAlex was built by OurResearch, the team responsible for Unpaywall (the open access status database) and Unsub (the journal subscription analysis tool). The name is a reference to the Great Library of Alexandria. OpenAlex inherited the ambition of Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), a Microsoft Research project that had indexed over 250 million works before its retirement on 31 December 2021. Many research tools and bibliometric workflows that had depended on MAG migrated to OpenAlex. The core metadata in OpenAlex comes from Crossref (DOI registration agency), supplemented by PubMed for biomedical works, Semantic Scholar, and data from institutional repositories and preprint servers. Unpaywall data is integrated to provide open access status (gold, green, bronze, hybrid, or closed) for each work. Author disambiguation uses ORCID where authors have registered persistent identifiers, supplemented by OurResearch's own disambiguation algorithms. Institution disambiguation uses ROR (Research Organisation Registry) identifiers.
OpenAlex vs subscription bibliographic databases
Scopus (Elsevier) and Web of Science (Clarivate) are the two dominant subscription-based bibliographic databases, both offering curated journal indexing, citation analysis, and researcher-level metrics. Both apply selective inclusion criteria and maintain editorial review boards; Scopus covers approximately 28,000 journals and Web of Science approximately 21,000 across its core collection. OpenAlex takes a different approach: rather than selective curation, it ingests broadly and relies on entity disambiguation to improve data quality. This means OpenAlex typically has broader coverage, particularly for preprints, conference proceedings, and non-English-language sources, but also includes some works that would not pass Scopus or WoS quality criteria. For comprehensive systematic reviews in biomedicine, PubMed remains the primary source because of its controlled MeSH vocabulary. OpenAlex is most powerful for cross-disciplinary bibliometric analysis, institutional reporting, and integration with open CRIS systems where subscription costs are prohibitive.
API, bulk data, and use cases
The OpenAlex REST API is freely available without registration for low-volume use and with free API key registration for higher-volume queries. It supports filtering by field, institution, concept, year, OA status, and many other dimensions, and returns paginated JSON results. All OpenAlex data is available for bulk download as snapshot files stored in Amazon S3, updated monthly, allowing organisations to run their own instances or analysis pipelines without API rate limits. Practical use cases include: institutional publication reporting (pulling all outputs affiliated with a ROR-identified institution); open access compliance monitoring (tracking green and gold OA rates for funder reporting); journal analysis (replacing Unpaywall journal-level queries); and bibliometric network analysis (co-authorship, citation, and concept networks). Several CRIS vendors and library analytics tools have integrated the OpenAlex API as a free alternative or supplement to Scopus and WoS.
Key facts
At a glance
- Launched January 2022 by OurResearch (formerly Impactstory)
- Replaced Microsoft Academic Graph, retired December 2021
- Data licence: CC0 (public domain dedication)
- 250M+ works, 250M+ authors, 100k+ institutions, 55k+ sources indexed
- Uses ROR for institution disambiguation, ORCID for author disambiguation
- Integrates Unpaywall data for open access status on each indexed work
Common misconceptions
What people often get wrong
Often heard: OpenAlex is just a replacement for Google Scholar.
Actually: OpenAlex and Google Scholar serve different purposes. Google Scholar is a search interface for finding literature; it does not provide a bulk data download, a structured API, or transparent coverage criteria. OpenAlex is designed for programmatic access, bibliometric analysis, and CRIS integration, not primarily for individual literature discovery.
Often heard: OpenAlex citation counts are the same as Scopus or Web of Science citation counts.
Actually: Citation counts vary between databases because each indexes a different set of source documents. OpenAlex's broader coverage means it typically captures more citing documents than WoS, but its coverage is less curated, so counts are not directly comparable. Researchers should specify which database was used when reporting citation counts.
Often heard: OpenAlex data requires a licence agreement to use.
Actually: OpenAlex data is released under CC0 (no rights reserved). The API can be used freely without a subscription agreement, and bulk data can be downloaded from S3 without charge. OurResearch requests attribution as good practice but it is not legally required.
Going deeper
