Inspired by the Library of Alexandria, we catalog 474 million scholarly works, linking them to authors, institutions, funders, and more—all fully open.
Our open-source tools are used by millions of people every day in universities, businesses, libraries, and governments worldwide to uncover, connect, and analyze research. We believe knowledge should be open, and that's why OpenAlex is governed by a 501(c)3 nonprofit, all our code is completely open source, and our datasets are free to use under a CC0 license.
Why OpenAlex?
OpenAlex is an open, comprehensive index of scholarly works. Compared to legacy paywalled services, OpenAlex offers significant advantages in inclusivity, affordability, and availability.
OpenAlex is:
- Big — We're focused on coverage inclusive, offering particular advantages in coverage of works from diverse languages and from the Global South. OpenAlex now indexes more than 477 million works, the largest connected repository of scholarship ever published.
- Easy — Our service is fast, modern, and well-documented, with a well-documented API, a command-line tool, and a website for exploring the data.
- Open — The complete dataset is free under the CC0 license, supporting transparency and reuse.
We believe the global research system is one of humankind's most beautiful creations. OpenAlex aims to make that whole creation available to everyone, everywhere.
Past and future
Let's start way back at the beginning, with the ancient Library of Alexandria. Working to create a Universal Library, they didn't just gather knowledge—they made it useful by indexing it in the world's first library catalog, the Pinakes. That's what we're trying to do, too, and so our name is an homage to them.
Fast forward a few millennia: oh OpenAlex beta launched on January 3, 2022. The web application for exploring the data launched in beta in October 2023. In late 2025 we shipped Walden—a complete rewrite of the OpenAlex codebase on a modern Databricks infrastructure—which now lets us iterate on data quality in days instead of months.
Unpaywall (our index of Open Access publications) now runs as a subroutine of the OpenAlex codebase, and Unsub (a tool helping librarians cancel toll-access journals) also runs on OpenAlex data.
Our sustainability plan
OpenAlex has a multi-year track record of building sustainable scholarly infrastructure, and a formal commitment to sustainability through our adoption of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). You can read our most recent POSI self-assessment on the OpenAlex blog.
The core OpenAlex data will always be free. The full dataset—hundreds of millions of works and all associated metadata—is free to download, share, remix, and build on under a CC0 license, with quarterly public snapshots. To keep that open infrastructure healthy and growing, we charge for services built on top of the data, in line with the POSI principle of revenue based on services, not data.
Our sustainability model has two main parts:
- Usage-based pricing (for developers and UI users), and
- Institutional plans (for organizations).
Learn more about both on our pricing page.
Acknowledgements
We'd like to thank everyone behind all of our data sources, but especially the folks at MAG for building a really audacious and cool thing—and for the help and support they provided as we built its replacement. We're also grateful to Arcadia, the Wellcome Trust, our institutional Members, Member+, and Partner organizations, and the countless community members who contribute metadata corrections, bug reports, and feature requests.