Pricing

OpenAlex is free.

The website, API, and data snapshot are all available at no charge. The data is licensed as CC0 so it is free to use and distribute. As a nonprofit, making this data free and open is part of our mission.

Being sustainable is also part of our mission! Our sustainability depends on revenue from two value-add offerings: paid subscribers and consulting services. So if you’re looking for our services in addition to our data, or simply want to support open science, consider our paid services below. Contact us to get a quote—and a free trial!

OpenAlex Paid Subscriptions

	Free	Premium	Institutional
Update frequency	Monthly (via data dump)	Hourly (via API)	Hourly (via API)
API limit	100k/day, max 10/second	As needed	As needed
Support	Best effort	Priority (≤ 5 users)	Priority (all your users)
Additional services	—	—	Training, Advisory Services, Feature suggestions

Update frequency

We release a new snapshot of OpenAlex every month. If you’d like more up-to-date data, you can poll our API to be notified of new and modified works every hour. That way your local copy of OpenAlex will be perfectly synced with ours.

To do this, you just use two API filters available to subscribers, along with a unique API key we give you as part of your subscription.

API limit

The API has a limit of 100,000 calls per day, with a maximum of 10 per second. However, for Premium users we can (and do) support millions of calls per day, with low latency and high uptime. You just need to include your unique Premium API key along with your requests, and you’re good to go.

Priority support

We use an online ticketing system open to all OpenAlex users around the world for support requests. With the volume we receive, we can’t respond to every ticket as quickly as some users need. Premium and Institutional users’ tickets get marked as high priority and skip to the head of the queue when they have support requests. This may be critical for some institutions relying on OpenAlex data.

Additional services

For Premium and Institutional Subscribers, OpenAlex consultants will give virtual training events for their institution on OpenAlex data and how to use it (generic and custom training available). OpenAlex consultants will also meet with Institutional subscribers to discuss planned and on-going projects using OpenAlex data to provide advice. Institutional subscribers will also be invited to quarterly workshops to suggest and discuss OpenAlex feature development, directly.

Paid Consulting Services

Open data brings limitless potential. We are proud when institutions use our data for custom analytics or software development, but also recognize many institutions do not have the staff resources for such work. Our team of experts in data science, software development, bibliometrics, and research strategy can provide a wide range of consulting services. A few examples are included below, but reach out if you don’t see what you’re looking for—we can probably help!

Affiliation and Author Curation Services

Quality metadata is critical to our mission and we will always strive for high standards across our database. We benefit from community feedback to support enhanced metadata curation for their works. Some institutions without staff who can work on metadata curation can hire our consultants to systematically identify and resolve data accuracy issues associated with their institution or researcher author profiles.

Custom Research Classification Services

We use machine learning models to classify research works into SDGs, Domains, Fields, Subfields, and Topics. Some institutions want to apply these same models to other sources of academic data (e.g., their grants, course curricula) or develop new models that classify works against a custom taxonomy. We can do both!

Disambiguation as a service

Author name metadata comes in many forms. We use algorithms to disambiguate author name data into author profiles for all the works in OpenAlex. When institutions need OpenAlex author metadata disambiguated from other datasets or systems not in OpenAlex, we can use our algorithms to match internal or external identifier data to our Author IDs.

Custom Bibliometric Analyses and Reports

Our team of experts regularly advise institutions and researchers around the world in the design and execution of their bibliometric analyses. But we can also perform bespoke high-quality analyses using OpenAlex data to meet unique needs. Does your institution need help defining a custom research area, developing custom indicators, or performing specific analyses? In a fee-for-service model, we take on bibliometric projects of all shapes and sizes to meet client needs in an open, repeatable, and shareable manner.