Author: Jason

New Features and Usage-Based Pricing

Today we’re adding some features to the OpenAlex API: better search, content download, and new docs. Most importantly, we’re also introducing usage-based pricing.

New features

Advanced search at last

We’ve had lots of request for advanced search features to support systematic reviews. Good news: they’re here!

  • Proximity search: find terms near each other
  • Exact matching: skip stemming when you need precision
  • Wildcards: for when you’re not sure of the exact form
  • Lonnnnng queries: Searches can be up to several pages in length (8kb)

Find details and examples of advanced search in the new developer docs here.

Note for developers: the old filter syntax for search is now deprecated; the ?search= parameter approach remains. It’ll be the One Way To Do It moving forward. Filter searches will redirect to the ?search param.

Semantic search

We’re also launching semantic search. Instead of just matching keywords, it uses embeddings to match the meaning of your search–so a search for “kelp biomechanics” also finds articles about algae and wave mechanics. But you don’t have to stop there: you can even paste a whole abstract into the search bar to find related papers!

Semantic search is in beta; we don’t recommend using it for sensitive production workflows yet. But we would love to hear your feedback! If it’s well-used we’ll continue to invest more resources into it.

Full-text downloads

We’re hosting PDFs and TEI XML for our 60M open-access works. You can search and filter for works of interest, filter to get just ones with PDFs, and then download the PDFs in bulk—all with the API. Or you can use our new OpenAlex CLI to do it from the command line, massively parallelized, in a single command. Or your agent can—they love CLIs.

openalex download \ 
  --api-key YOUR_KEY \ 
  --output ./climate-pdfs \ 
  --filter "topics.id:T10325,has_content.pdf:true" \ 
  --content pdf

See the full-text documentation for details.

New docs

We’ve completely rebuilt our documentation. The old docs are deprecated and will redirect soon. The new docs are clearer, cleaner, up to date, and AI-optimized. We want to make OpenAlex as easy as possible to use for everyone, whether they’re an expert or a novice vibe-coding their first app.

API keys are now required.

As we announced in January, you’ll need an API key for all requests. Getting one is free and takes about 30 seconds: create an account at openalex.org, then grab your key at openalex.org/settings/api. You can still make a few calls without an API key for demo purposes, but it’s not suitable for any kind of production use. The API keys are essential for our new usage-based pricing model. What’s a usage-based pricing model? Gentle Reader, a mere centimeter now separates you from the answer. 👇

Usage-based pricing

Different API operations cost us different amounts to run. Doing stuff with PDFs is expensive, but looking up a single work by ID is nearly free. We think it’s essential that our pricing reflects these actual costs. Usage-based pricing is a natural fit for this: it’s transparent, sustainable, and fair.

Here’s what things cost. See the developer docs for more details.

endpointcost per callcost per 1,000 calls
single work lookup by DOI or ID00
list and filter$0.0001$0.10
search$0.001$1.00
PDF/XML download$0.01$10.00

Free usage

Every API key gets $1 of free usage per day. We’ve always subsidized free users using revenue from paying ones–this makes the exact extent of that subsidy clear, transparent, and unambiguous.

What does that daily dollar get you? Assuming you return 100 works per request:

endpointdaily free callsdaily free results
single work lookup by DOI or IDunlimited unlimited
list and filter10,0001,000,000
search1,000100,000
PDF/XML download100100

To use a real-world example: grabbing all 694k works by Finnish authors takes about 7k paginated requests at $0.10 per thousand or $0.70. That’s covered by your free daily allowance. But if you want all 9 million works from Japan, that will cost about $9. (You could even download all 480M works in OpenAlex this way for $480—but don’t do that lol, download the full dataset instead, it’s free).

It’s easy to track your usage: every API response includes headers showing how much you’ve spent and how much you’ve got left. You can also check openalex.org/settings/usage anytime.

Prepaid usage

Most users will find that the free plan covers all their needs. However, for some projects, you may need more usage. The great thing about usage-based pricing is that most of the time this will only cost you a few bucks. You’re just paying for what you need. You can buy prepaid usage in 1min with your credit card, whenever you want, however much you want. It supplements your daily free allowance.

Organizational plans

Organizations also buy prepaid usage. But many will want to get annual plans instead, which offer major discounts, data sync, curation dashboards, and more. Check out our new Member, Member+, and Supporter plans for more details.

FAQ

I thought it was free? The data remains free. The full OpenAlex dataset—all 480M works, all the metadata—is free to download, share, remix, and build on. We’re committed to keeping it sustainably free by charging for a service (the API) built on that dataset. Free data, paid service–this is the path laid out in the POSI principles, which we’ve signed and enthusiastically support. 

How do I track my usage? Every API response includes usage info; you can also call the rate-limit endpoint or check your usage page on openalex.org. Learn more here. 

How is my usage data used? We analyze usage data to improve the overall service and we provide institutions aggregated usage summaries for their institutions upon request. We only collect what we need to run OpenAlex. We aren’t building tools to monitor individuals and we don’t sell your data. You can read our full privacy policy here.

Why charge per request instead of per result? We’re trying to link our costs to our pricing, and our costs mostly scale with requests, not results; a search that returns 10 results costs us about the same as one that returns 10,000.

Will prices change?

Yes, probably. The point of this model is to keep our prices tightly linked to our costs, and our costs will likely change with new tech, new use cases, and new data.

Where from here?

AI accelerates every day. The future of knowledge is getting rebuilt, right now. If we build on checkerboards of enclosed, walled gardens, we build a fragmented, incoherent future for scholarship and humanity.

We think OpenAlex can help with that. We’re gathering and connecting the literature into a cohesive living library, complete and organized and accessible to everyone. Today’s new pricing model helps us stay in this for the long haul.

An API-based sustainability model lets us deliver (and monetize) value in the post-GUI era. Soon, users won’t go to openalex.org (or any SaaS website), they’ll use APIs to vibe-code a custom interface for any question in minutes. [1] The post-GUI world will be tough on some open sustainability models. But it’s also an amazing opportunity for open infrastructure, if we adapt our pricing model correctly. That’s what we’re doing today.

We’re so very excited about this next chapter. Questions? Hit us up at support@openalex.org.

Let’s build!

[1] Check out our Q1 town hall for more on our post-GUI strategy, and check out this vibe-coding webinar to see several real-life examples of building five-minute custom OpenAlex dashboards.

OpenAlex 2026 Roadmap

We just wrapped up our Q1 2026 Town Hall. You can watch the full recording here, but this post covers the highlights: what we shipped last quarter, what’s coming this quarter, and why we think 2026 is a pivotal year for open science.

What we shipped in Q4

The Walden rewrite is done. OpenAlex now runs on a modern Databricks infrastructure that lets us ship faster and iterate on data quality in days instead of months.

We added 192 million new works from DataCite and repositories. OpenAlex now indexes 477 million works—the largest connected repository of scholarship ever published.

On funders and awards: we created Awards as a first-class entity, extracted 27 million funder links from fulltext PDFs, and integrated 15 new funders directly.

What’s coming in Q1

For enterprise users: Credit-based API pricing launches this month. Different calls cost different amounts:

  • a singleton (/works/w123) is 1 credit,
  • a list (/works?filter=foo:bar) is 10,
  • PDF content (coming this month!) is 100,
  • vector search is 1,000. (coming soon! email steve@ourresearch.org for early access!)

We’re also launching a sync service so you can pull daily updates in one chunk instead of polling millions of records.

For institutions: Affiliation matching curation launches in February. Members can edit the matching algorithm that links affiliation strings to their institution. Changes propagate to the API within a day—permanently improving the dataset for everyone.

We’re also launching two membership tiers at $5k and $20k/year that include ability to curate your own data in OpenAlex, training/consulting, and pro API keys with higher API access for your faculty.

For researchers: A complete rewrite of author name disambiguation ships by end of Q1. This has always been the hardest problem in bibliometrics. With today’s AI, we think we can build the most accurate system ever made.

The bigger picture

There’s a lot more I want to say about why 2026 feels like a pivotal year—why we think the GUI is dead, why open data wins the AI era, and what that means for OpenAlex. I’ll save that for a follow-up post. For now: watch the town hall to hear the full argument, and try the vibe-coded demo I built live during the talk. And join our mailing list to stay up-to-date on all the wild stuff we’re doing this year. It’s going to be, by far, our biggest year ever. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

OpenAlex rewrite (“Walden”) launch!

Today, OpenAlex gets a new engine.

After a year of rebuilding, refactoring, and retesting, the Walden rewrite is now live — powering all of OpenAlex. It’s the same dataset shape you know, but faster, cleaner, and more complete.

You’ll notice better references, better OA detection, better language and license coverage, better everything. We’ve added 190 million new works, including datasets, software, and other research objects from DataCite and thousands of repositories. And thanks to our new foundation, fixes and improvements now roll out in days, not months.

Want to see exactly what changed? Check out OREO — the OpenAlex Rewrite Evaluation Overview — to compare old vs. new data in detail. [edit Dec 13, 2025: OREO is no longer up because the legacy OpenAlex data is no longer being updated…it’s all Walden now, so there’s no comparator].

And if you’d like to dig into the full list of updates, the Walden release notes have you covered.

For the next few weeks, you can still access the old dataset with data-version=1, and starting tomorrow, you can download full snapshots of both the legacy and Walden datasets in the usual way.

The rebuild is done. The road ahead is wide open.

Onward.

OpenAlex rewrite enters beta! 🎉

It’s a big week at OpenAlex. On Monday, we announced that OpenAlex is now our top-level brand (and retired the “OurResearch” name). Yesterday we unveiled our new logo. And today, we’re thrilled to launch the beta release of our fully-rewritten codebase (codenamed Walden)!

Walden is faster, bigger, and more maintainable–that means quicker bug fixes, more content, easier feature development, and a smoother experience all around.

Throughout October, we’ll be running Walden and the old system (Classic) side by side, with Classic remaining the default. On November 1 2025, Walden becomes default, and we’ll publish the last data snapshot from the old system (more info on timelines here).

How to test-drive Walden

Walden beta is already live in the API and UI so you can start exploring it right away!

Just remember that it’s still in beta: there are lots of known issues and it’s changing every day. If you notice an that’s not already in OREO tests or known issues, report it here.

Key improvements

When you check it out, what should you expect to see? The best way to view a list of improvements is to check out the tests in OREO, especially work tests. But here’s a high-level overview:

  • 150M+ new works: Newly indexed articles, books, datasets, software, dissertations, and more! You can explore just the newly added works here.
  • Better consistency: Unpaywall and OpenAlex will now always agree.
  • Better metadata: more citations, more language and retraction coverage, better keywords, more OA data.

Looking Ahead

The last year of rewriting OpenAlex was tough. We couldn’t move as fast as we wanted on new features, and support often lagged. But now we’re equipped to move fast without breaking things. Expect faster improvements, better support, and more ambitious features dropping in Q4, including:

  • Community curation: fix mistakes (like in Wikipedia) and see them reflected in days.
  • Vector search endpoint: find relevant works and other entities based on semantic similarity of free-form text
  • Download endpoint: Access PDF text from DOI or OpenAlex ID
  • Better funding metadata: New grants entity with better coverage of grant objects and linkages to research outputs and funders

This is a turning point for OpenAlex—and we’re excited to build the future of research infrastructure together with you. The engine’s rebuilt. The road ahead is wide open. Let’s go.

PS want to learn more about Walden? Come to our webinar Oct 7th at 10am Eastern. You can register to attend here.

A New Logo for OpenAlex

This is a big week for OpenAlex: yesterday we reorganized under the OpenAlex brand, and tomorrow we launch our completely rewritten codebase (beta). Today we launch our new logo!

The old logo was unique and conveyed the idea of building, which we loved. But was also visually complex, almost Escheresque; consequently, it didn’t scale down well, and it failed to convey the directness, boldness, and simplicity of our vision: to create a universal, open library of scholarly information.

So as we start a new chapter in OpenAlex, it’s a great time to also launch a new look.

You Bring the Color

We’re doubling down on black and white. That’s not just a design choice, it’s a statement of philosophy. OpenAlex is infrastructure. We’re the pipes under the city, not the flashy towers above it. We want to stay out of your way and let your projects, your creativity, your insights provide the color. You’ll see this commitment carry through in our website, which now leans harder into that clean, monochrome look.

A New Typeface

We’ve switched to Inter. Of course it’s open, just like us. Inter is modern and businesslike, but still human, readable, and approachable. Compared to Dosis (our old font), Inter is sharper, more confident, and more professional—while keeping the sense of openness that’s core to who we are. You’ll see Inter across our site from now on.

The Icon

The new icon is simple: a single, continuously curved outline forms three joined dots. Individually, dots are just dots—but when you connect them, something new emerges:

  • It’s an A for Alex—but sans crossbar, offering an open doorway in.
  • It’s a connected network—could be works and citations, coauthorships, or any of the billions of nodes and edges in the OpenAlex graph.
  • It’s a simplified water molecule.

Why Water?

Water has increasingly become part of our story of what OpenAlex is. Water’s simple but essential. We count on shared infrastructure to deliver it, quietly and reliably, cheaply, but not for free.

At OpenAlex we want to be the pipes under the scholarly city: infrastructure that delivers research information wherever it’s needed, at scale, for cheap. We’re here to support all the amazing things the research ecosystem is doing—quietly, reliably, and everywhere.

A Modern Library of Alexandria

The original Library of Alexandria aimed to collect all scholarly knowledge. OpenAlex means to carry that spirit forward in the digital age: building an open, connected, comprehensive graph of the world’s research.

Our new logo—an open A, a network, a molecule of water—is our way of putting that vision front and center. And if you see a pyramid in this logo, it’s not an accident, it’s homage.

The new logo is a reminder of what we’re building: a simple, open, essential infrastructure for the world’s research information: cheap, reliable, everywhere. That’s OpenAlex.

PS for logo nerds, other inspo: Vercel, the Banner of Peace, and iconic Paul Rand banger Westinghouse.

We’re now OpenAlex

For years, we’ve been working under the name OurResearch. That name sat at the top of our org chart, with three child projects under it: OpenAlex, Unpaywall, and Unsub.

Starting today, things are simpler: that org chart now has just one parent—OpenAlex—with Unpaywall and Unsub beneath it.

Why the change? Three reasons:

1. Fewer brands is clearer

We’re a tiny team, and having so many brands has always been confusing. People wondered: are we OurResearch (or Our Research), or OpenAlex, or Unpaywall, or something else? From now on, the answer is simple: we’re OpenAlex.

2. OpenAlex is what we do

More and more, OpenAlex is the center of our work. It’s our biggest project and the one that takes most of our time. And it’s also the data engine behind our other projects: Unpaywall and Unsub both run on OpenAlex data. In fact, with the launch of our fully rewritten OpenAlex codebase (codenamed Walden) this week, Unpaywall runs as a subroutine of the OpenAlex codebase.

So in a real sense, Unpaywall and Unsub are just friendly wrappers around OpenAlex. Improving OpenAlex improves them automatically.

And the name OpenAlex, with its homage to the ancient Library of Alexandria, captures our long-term vision to gather, organize, and make open all scholarly information.

3. New name, new start

Legally, nothing dramatic is happening—our official name has always been Impactstory, Inc., and “OurResearch” was just a DBA. But this moment is more than just a bookkeeping change.

This is a new chapter for us. The past year has been tough: not much visible progress, a lot of repaying technical debt, and a long slog to rewrite our entire codebase. But that rewrite launches (in beta) this week. And with a fresh codebase comes a fresh start: we get to focus harder, move faster, and pour our energy into making OpenAlex as comprehensive, accurate, and open as possible.

So yes, the name change simplifies things. But more importantly, it marks a new focus and a renewed commitment to our vision: building a universal library of scholarship.

And while we’ll continue to support Unpaywall and Unsub for now, we want to be transparent: OpenAlex is the future. As its functionality grows over the next year or two, Unpaywall and Unsub users will be able to meet their use-cases directly via OpenAlex. The rising tide of OpenAlex lifts all boats.

This week is about OpenAlex

This post is the first of three announcements:

  • Monday: our name change to OpenAlex (that’s today).
  • Tuesday: our new logo.
  • Wednesday: the beta launch our fully rewritten OpenAlex codebase.

When we say we’re focusing on OpenAlex, it’s not just words—we’re shipping, this week. And there’s more coming in Q4:

  • A new API endpoint to directly download PDFs and parsed PDFs.
  • A self-serve curation portal (think Wikipedia editing, but for scholarly metadata), where your changes go live in a day or two.
  • A new vector search API.
  • Improved funder coverage, thanks to our new Wellcome Trust grant.

After a year of rebuilding, we’ve finally got the tools and the focus we need start delivering more substantively on our vision: a universal, open library of scholarly information. We’re energized. We’re ready. We’re OpenAlex.

Unpaywall improvements: more gold, better green

We recently announced that we’d completely rewritten Unpaywall to make it faster, more accurate, and (most importantly) easier to fix and improve. We wanted to move Unpaywall from product to process, something we could continuously improve along with the community.

Well, we’ve been working hard on that over the last few months and here’s an update!

Better Gold coverage

By far the most common OA color is gold. In fact, based on our manual sampling, 25% of Crossref DOIs are gold OA, which is much higher than I’d expected and much higher than it used to be. (note: in this and all following stats we exclude component DOIs, which aren’t indexed in Unpaywall).

Coverage of gold is very tricky, because it’s all about the status of the work’s source, not the work itself. So we need very comprehensive coverage of sources, which is as hard as it sounds.

Of course there’s DOAJ which is fantastic but they only cover a small subset of gold OA journals. And even for those journals, DOAJ often only tells us that a given journal is fully OA since a certain date—we still need to figure out if the back catalog is open or not.

In recent weeks, we’ve finished several projects to add the “this is gold OA” flag to new journals:

  • We crawled 50k OJS journals, adding gold status to 17,000 of them (many thanks to Juan Pablo Alperin and Diego Chavarro for their help in getting a list of OJS journals!)
  • We marked 1,200 new journals gold using data from J-STAGE.
  • We marked 100 new journals gold using data from SciELO
  • We added gold status to several dozen journals from fully-OA publishers including including MDPI, Academic Journals, and Edorium.

We also modified our algorithm to assign gold instead of bronze when we know an article is OA, but we can’t figure out its source. Since gold is 2.5x more common than bronze, this will result in fewer errors overall.

Overall, this has made a big change in our gold coverage: now 19% of Unpaywall is gold, compared to 14% in May.

Green OA

We’ve made several changes in our green OA approach. These have not increased our total green percentage, but they have made our assignment of colors more consistent.

The rule for green has always been that if the best OA location is in a repository, it’s green. But, like gold, this is very dependent on us correctly describing the source as a repository. We’re very good at this for institutional repositories—but we’ve not been so good for preprint and data repositories, which are both much more common today then they were when we started Unpaywall.

Other changes

We fixed a bug causing us to list works published under the Elsevier User License as Hybrid. Since we don’t consider that to be an OA license, we moved these to bronze.

We marked SSRN as an open repository…it’s on the bubble but since all works are available free right away, for us it counts.

Results

The “ground truth” dataset is a random sample of 500 DOIs from Crossref. It excludes component DOIs and DOIs that don’t resolve. Each DOI is manually annotated by our team, which often includes doing lots of research on the journals and repositories that host the content. The definitions of oa_status colors come from here, which is in turn based on the original 2018 Unpaywall paper in PeerJ.

As you can see, we’re moving in the correct direction when it comes to gold and hybrid, green isn’t changing, and bronze coverage is going backwards a bit, although it’s still pretty close to the ground truth number. Our roadmap will prioritize green and gold for the next few months at least.

The future

The most important change for Unpaywall moving forward is the upcoming rewrite of OpenAlex, which will be gradually rolled out October-November of this year. That’s because when this rewrite is deployed, OpenAlex and Unpaywall will finally share the exact same codebase. Of course this will eliminate those pesky, embarrassing bugs where Unpaywall and OpenAlex disagree. But more importantly, it’ll link the large Unpaywall and OpenAlex communities, allowing everyone to improve both products together.

Even before that, though, we’ll be unveiling another exciting change: a new and improved curation portal. This will make it easier to fix article-level bugs in Unpaywall, including bugs that current curation solution doesn’t address (like missing PDF URLs and incorrect licenses). Even cooler, though it’ll allow users to fix source-level bugs, particularly fixing journals that should be marked gold, but aren’t. Although someday AI might let us automate this, for now, we think that active community curation is the only viable way to keep that data accurate and up to date. The unification of OpenAlex and Unpaywall codebases means that all these changes will propagate to both systems within days.

Ok, that’s all for now! Thanks for your support and as always, please get in touch with any suggestions or feedback!

We’re Rebuilding OpenAlex While It’s Running — Here’s What’s Changing

TLDR: Over the next five months we’re migrating OpenAlex to a new, better codebase; our schema won’t change, but some data (5%) will, and we’ll add over 50 million new works.

Why the change

OpenAlex was written in a big hurry, to fill the gap left when Microsoft Academic Graph disappeared. The code was rushed and hacky, and it shows:

  • Unpaywall and OpenAlex are awkwardly integrated and sometimes disagree.
  • Fixing bugs and adding features takes forever.
  • Adding new sources (eg DataCite) and entity types (grants) is nigh impossible.

The solution

We’re merging the codebases of Unpaywall and OpenAlex, and rebuilding everything atop Apache Spark hosted on Databricks. This stack is more modern, maintainable, and much much faster.

What’s changing

Our goal is to fix the code, not change the functionality or data. That said, you’ll inevitably notice some changes, intended and otherwise. It’s like swapping out the engine of your car—while you’re driving. Here’s what will change:

  • 50+ million new works: we’re adding oodles of content from DataCite and institutional repositories, with more coming soon.
  • Unpaywall and OpenAlex will always agree (though they’ll stay separate apps).
  • You can edit our data: users will be able curate mistakes and see the curations applied within days.
  • Lots of small data changes across the whole dataset—for example, some works’ citation counts may grow or shrink, some works will get new OA links, etc. This is impossible to avoid, but our goal is to make sure nothing changes by more than 5%.
  • New topics algo: works created after the migration will use an updated algorithm but deliver similar results using the same taxonomy.
  • New keywords: works will get new keywords from a new algorithm based on our concepts algo.

What’s not changing

  • IDs will stay stable, so if you request a work/author/etc by OpenAlex ID you’ll get the same thing before and after the migration.
  • Functionality will stay the same in the API, web UI, and snapshot. It’ll all work like before.
  • The data schema won’t change.

Timeline

  • June 1: Unpaywall
  • Oct 1: Beta launch
    • Preliminary data from the new codebase can be used in the API by adding the data_version=2 param.
    • Web-based comparison tool launches
    • Beta snapshot of new data is published; you can explore this one.
  • Nov 1: Launch
    • The API and UI serve data from the new codebase by default.
    • Data from the old codebase deprecated but still available by adding in the API by using the data_version=1 param.
    • Prod snapshot of new data is published; you should use this one
  • Dec 1: Completion
    • Data from the old codebase is no longer available in API.
    • Web-based comparison tool retired
    • One last snapshot of the old data is published.

Stay up to date!

The rewrite is nearing release, but it’s still in very active development and we’re learning as we go. Some things might go worse than expected, some better. We’ll be making regular updates via the openalex-users Google Group, so sign up there if you want to stay up to date on everything.

How you can help keep OpenAlex free

Next month, we’re submitting a renewal application for our main grant. This grant helps keep OpenAlex free to you. We need your help to get the renewal. There are two ways to help:

  1. Write a short testimonial 
  2. Subscribe to our Premium service

Details below:

1. Testimonial

We need to show our funder that we’re making a real and necessary impact. Testimonials are amazing for that. Could you write us a quick testimonial? We need 5-7 sentences that answer these questions:

  • Who are you?
  • What problem is OpenAlex solving for you?
  • How did you solve it before us?
  • Why is OpenAlex a better solution?
  • What’s a concrete good outcome of using OpenAlex?
  • Would you recommend OpenAlex to others?

Here’s an (imaginary) example:

CatCademia connects academic researchers to share research ideas and cat pictures. For this we need publication lists for all users. Originally, users had to curate their own lists, which was a big pain point. Now we use OpenAlex’s open API to auto-generate users’ publication lists at signup. Upon launching this feature, we saw an immediate increase in user retention and cat-picture sharing. We highly recommend OpenAlex to anyone who needs high-quality, open scholarly data.

You can submit your testimonial here. Thanks!

2. Premium

We recently launched a paid upgrade to our service called OpenAlex Premium. Premium offers:

  • Faster updates, so you can get fresher data,
  • Higher API limits, so you can use the API more, and
  • Priority support for faster and more detailed help.

Our funder (correctly, imho) wants to see we’re on the road to self-sustainability. So, we’re asking you to take a look at Premium and see if it’s something that would help you. 

If not, no worries–we’re delighted to make most of what we do free, and we want users to enjoy that. But if it looks useful, please get in touch ASAP! We’re offering hefty early-adopter discounts to folks that sign up this month.

Thanks very much for your time and support!

Best,

The OpenAlex Team

New OpenAlex API features!

We’ve got a ton of great API improvements to report! If you’re an API user, there’s a good chance there’s something in here you’re gonna love.

Search

You can now search both titles and abstracts. We’ve also implemented stemming, so a search for “frogs” now automatically gets your results mentioning “frog,” too. Thanks to these changes, searches for works now deliver around 10x more results. This can all be accessed using the new search query parameter.

New entity filters

We’ve added support for tons of new filters, which are documented here. You can now:

  • get all of a work’s outgoing citations (ie, its references section) with a single query. 
  • search within each work’s raw affiliation data to find an arbitrary string (eg a specific department within an organization)
  • filter on whether or not an entity has a canonical external ID (works: has_doi, authors: has_orcid, etc)

Request multiple records by ID at once

This has been our most-requested feature and we’re super excited to roll it out! By using the new OR operator, you can request up to 50 entities in a single API call. You can use any ID we support–DOI, ISSN, OpenAlex ID, etc.

Deep paging

Using cursor-based paging, you can now retrieve an infinite number of results (it used to be just the top 10,000). But remember: if you want to download the entire dataset, please use the snapshot, not the API! The snapshot is the exact same data in the exact same format, but much much faster and cheaper for you and us.

More groups in group_by queries

We now return the top 200 groups (it used to be just the top 50).

New Autocomplete endpoint

Our new autocomplete endpoint dead easy to use our data to power an autocomplete/typeahead widget in your own projects. It works for any of our five entity types (works, authors, venues, institutions, or concepts). If you’ve got users inputting the names of journals, institutions, or other entities, now you can easily let them choose an entity instead of entering free text–and then you can store the ID (ISSN, ROR, whatever) instead of passing strings around everywhere. 

Better docs

In addition to documenting the new features above, we’ve also added lots of new documentation for existing features, addressing our most frequent questions and requests:

Thanks to everyone who’s been in touch to ask for new features, report bugs, and tell us where we can improve (also where we’re doing well, we’re ok with that too).
We’ll continue improving the API and the docs. We’re also putting tons of work into improving the underlying dataset’s accuracy and coverage, and we’re happy to report that we’ve improved a lot on what we inherited from MAG, with more improvements to come. We’ve delayed the launch of the full web UI, but expect that in the summer…we are so excited about all the possibilities that’s going to open up.