Research relies on software. Software written by scientists, for science, runs through the entire modern research stack: NumPy and SciPy, R and ggplot2, Jupyter, BLAST, ImageJ, AlphaFold. Yet in the scholarly record, that software is nearly invisible. Software is not usually cited formally in publications and is usually just mentioned in the text, which means the software (and the people who build and maintain it) never shows up in the databases the research world uses to find, measure, and reward scholarship.
We’re going to fix that. Thanks to a 2-year grant from Schmidt Sciences, OpenAlex is joining forces with a team at University of Texas at Austin led by James Howison to make research software a first-class part of the open scholarly graph. It’s a problem we’ve been chipping away at for a long time: over a decade ago we built Depsy as an early proof of concept for measuring the impact of research software. Now we get to do it properly, at the scale of the full scholarly graph. Work kicks off in mid-August 2026 (you can read the full proposal here).
Why software, and why now
The scholarly graph records the relationships among papers, authors, institutions, funders, and topics. It’s how researchers find work, how contributors get credit, and how funders and institutions make decisions. But because software so rarely appears in reference lists, it can’t be found or measured in any of today’s scholarly databases, open or proprietary.
That invisibility has real costs. Research software engineers whose tools underpin entire disciplines struggle in promotion and tenure processes because their contributions don’t “count.” Funders can’t see where software investments would make the biggest difference, or what impact past investments have had. And as AI coding assistants become part of everyday research practice, the missing link between papers and the code behind them is exactly the context those systems need most.
What you can expect in OpenAlex
This grant funds a set of major additions to OpenAlex that users have been asking about for years:
Software as a research entity. We’ll seed OpenAlex with an initial registry of software projects and add software as a work type (in fact, we just launched this), connected to the rest of the graph: authors, institutions, topics, funders, and the papers that use it. Each software entity will link out to external identifiers (package registries, repository URLs, DOIs, Software Heritage IDs) with full provenance.
Software mentions, extracted from full text. Most software never makes it into reference lists, so we’ll find it where it actually lives: in the text of papers. We’re building a mention-extraction and disambiguation pipeline that links papers to the specific software they use, and we’ll expose the results through a new citation object, complete with the surrounding text context, the citation type, and confidence scores, all searchable through its own API endpoint.
True versioning, for software and for all works. Software changes constantly, and “which version did they use?” matters for everything from reproducibility to impact measurement. We’re adding a generalized versioning model to the OpenAlex schema. Software is the first beneficiary, but versioning will extend to other work types where it’s increasingly important, like datasets and preprints.
Credit for the people who build research software. Author profiles will gain software-specific contribution and adoption metrics, so the maintainers of foundational tools can finally show where their work is used, much as in systems that already track publications.
Along the way, we’ll be upgrading the machinery underneath: broader full-text coverage, faster PDF parsing, and improved author disambiguation, all of which will improve OpenAlex well beyond software.
All of it will be open, as always: CC0 data, open source code, and open documentation, available through the OpenAlex API, UI, and snapshot.
We’re hiring
OpenAlex will build and operate the production systems, while a team at the University of Texas at Austin, led by James Howison, brings deep expertise in research software scholarship and software mention extraction. A project this size needs more hands. OpenAlex will be opening several new positions in the next few weeks, spanning data and software engineering and community management roles. Keep an eye on openalex.org/jobs, and if this is the kind of problem you want to work on, we’d love to hear from you.
Thank you
We’re grateful to Schmidt Sciences for backing this work. Making research software visible has been a goal of the research software community for more than a decade, and we’re honored to help build the open infrastructure that finally makes it routine.
As always, we’d love your feedback: if you have use cases for software metadata in OpenAlex, ideas, or concerns, get in touch at support@openalex.org.
—The OpenAlex Team