Author profile privacy

OpenAlex indexes the world’s scholarly research: over 250 million works, gathered from public sources like publishers, repositories, Crossref, and ORCID. When several works share the same author, our system groups them into an author profile.

Your author profile isn’t a biography, and nobody wrote it — it’s generated automatically, and it contains only bibliographic facts that are already part of the public scholarly record: your name as printed on your papers, the affiliations listed on those papers, and public identifiers like your ORCID iD. If you’ve published research, you likely have a profile, just as you appear in a library catalog — no account or consent is involved, and there’s nothing private in it.

Because profiles are assembled by an algorithm matching names across millions of works, they sometimes get things wrong: a paper by someone with a similar name lands on your profile, your work is split across two profiles, or an old affiliation shows up as current. These errors are fixable, and we want to fix them.

Fixing your profile

The fastest paths, in order:

1. Claim your profile. Sign in at openalex.org, find your profile, and claim it. Once verified, you can correct which works belong to you directly.
2. Report an error. Use the “Fix errors” option on the profile page, or see reporting data errors. Tell us the profile ID (like A5012345678) and the specific works or affiliations that are wrong — links or DOIs help a lot.
3. Email support if neither works for you.

Corrections are free and don’t require any legal paperwork. Common fixes: removing works that aren’t yours, merging duplicate profiles, splitting conflated authors, correcting a linked ORCID, and updating affiliations. The full self-serve story is on the fixing authors page.

One thing to know: fixes flow through our data pipeline, so they can take a few days to appear everywhere.

Removing your profile

Some researchers ask us to delete their profile entirely. Here’s how we handle that, honestly and up front:

• We don’t delete author profiles simply on request. OpenAlex exists to provide a complete public record of scholarship, and that record includes who wrote what. A missing profile makes the record wrong for everyone who cites, funds, hires, or builds on your work. (This is the norm for scholarly databases generally — bibliographic indexes preserve the published record.)
• Most removal requests are really correction requests. If the reason you want your profile gone is that it’s wrong — wrong papers, wrong affiliation, mixed up with someone else — a correction solves the actual problem, usually quickly. Start there.
• We will remove a profile when your particular situation outweighs the public record. If you have specific circumstances — for example, a verified safety risk — email [email protected] and describe your situation. We weigh each request individually, acknowledge promptly, and aim to give you a substantive answer within 30 days. If we decline, we’ll tell you why, and if you’re in the EU or UK you can raise it with your data protection authority.
• What removal can and can’t cover. We can suppress the profile — the page that groups your works. We can’t remove your name from the works themselves: bylines are the published record, supplied by publishers and repositories. To change a byline, contact the publisher of record; once they correct it, OpenAlex reflects the change.

For institutions and repositories

If your institution received a data-subject request that requires removing a harvested record, and you’ve already removed it at the source, email [email protected] with the work ID and evidence of the upstream removal — we’ll mirror it. We can’t remove records that are still live at the source.

The legal details

The formal version of this policy — what data we hold about researchers in the dataset, its public bibliographic sources, our legal basis for processing it, and how we handle correction and removal requests — lives in the “Personal Data in the OpenAlex Dataset” section of our Privacy Policy.