Open Science is an international movement to make science (and its benefits) accessible to all of society (scientists, entrepreneurs, non-profits, the public, etc.). For some introductory reading, check out CDL's 8 Pillars of Open Science and LERU's Open Science Roadmap.
To us, open means that our data is freely accessible to everyone around the world under a No Rights Reserved license (more on the CC0 license here). And accessible is an important part of our mission. After all if you put something at the centre of a maze and don't lock the doors on the maze entrance, it's technically open but hardly accessible. Likewise, users with big data capacities can download the entirety of our dataset for free at any time (link with instructions); even beginner coders can access our easy-to-use API (link to documentation); and non-technical users can access OpenAlex using our free User Interface (openalex.org). And as we continue to develop, we'll continue making it easier to access OpenAlex and insights from the database.
Ensuring that OpenAlex continues to be completely open and free means putting a lot of care into our sustainability plan, which relies heavily on the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). In a market where data is increasingly viewed as 'the new oil', value is derived by limited access to that data. Our view is that scholarly metadata is critical to a thriving society and so we instead make the data completely open and reusable freely with value being derived by our time and services as well as higher volume and faster access to data needed by commercial providers (more on that here). None of this would have been possible without a grant from Arcadia (more on that here), through our paid services, we expect to have reached financial sustainability by 2028.
Making all of our data and source code freely available for reuse also provides additional guarantee to our communities of users that they can rely on this long-term. As a non-profit, we're not an attractive target for corporate take-overs but if something tragic were to happen to our team or a future iteration of our Board wanted to try and sell off any of these assets, another group could take what we've made and continue the mission-- and we know a few groups already who have the capabilities to do that.