OpenAlex: 2025 in Review

2025 was a defining year for OpenAlex. After two years of learning what the world needs from OpenAlex, we spent last year rebuilding our entire foundation and massively expanding our coverage. During this rebuild, we served exponential growth across academia, government, and industry, solidifying OpenAlex as essential global infrastructure for research.

A New Foundation: Walden Launch

At the end of the year, we launched Walden, the complete rewrite of the OpenAlex system.

On day one, Walden added more than 190 million new works, including records from DataCite and thousands of institutional repositories. For the first time, OpenAlex now creates records even when research exists only in repositories—making millions of previously hard-to-find works truly discoverable. These new records currently live as a dedicated subset (xpac) while we continue strengthening metadata before full integration into the core index.

Walden also gives OpenAlex a modern, flexible architecture making it faster to add new sources, easier to improve quality at scale, and ready for the next generation of features and curation.

Unprecedented Adoption & Global Reach

Use of OpenAlex grew dramatically, ending the year with:

  • 350,000+ monthly unique visitors to our UI
  • 3+ million monthly pageviews on our UI
  • 1.5 billion monthly API calls across OpenAlex (1B) + Unpaywall (0.5B), exceeding Crossref for the first time!
  • 1,100+ Research outputs in 2025 referencing OpenAlex

Rebranding and Clarifying the Mission

As OpenAlex continued to expand, it became clear that OpenAlex is not just one of our products—it is our mission. And in 2025, we reorganized to reflect that realization.

Today:

  • OpenAlex is the purpose and platform.
  • Unpaywall is a slice of the OpenAlex database delivered in a specific format.
  • Unsub is a dashboard built on top of OpenAlex, supporting specific use cases.

This unified identity makes it clearer for our users, clearer for our partners, and clearer for ourselves what we are collectively building together.

Financial Progress & Sustainability

We achieved major sustainability milestones in 2025:

  • Reached our year 2 $800k ARR target—three months ahead of schedule
  • Received a $3.5M Wellcome grant to integrate global research funding metadata
  • Continued strong renewal rates and growing institutional engagement

Running both the old and new systems in parallel, supporting unprecedented usage growth, and delivering Walden led to higher costs than projected. But these were intentional investments to make OpenAlex stronger, more scalable, and more valuable for the long term.

Looking Ahead

With Walden now live, we’re excited to start our next chapter. In 2026, we will:

  • Launch full community curation pipelines
  • Integrate global funding metadata
  • Begin integrating research software as first class research objects
  • Deepen partnerships with governments, universities, and industry, rolling out new support models and new features.
  • Continue strengthening sustainability and reliability

Thank You

To everyone who contributed, partnered, advocated, experimented, and trusted OpenAlex this year: thank you! We are thrilled and humbled to watch OpenAlex become the open, global scholarly knowledge graph the world depends on and are deeply aware that none of this happens without you.

Here’s to an even bigger 2026.

— The OpenAlex Team