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 [edit Dec 13, 2025: OREO is no longer up because the legacy OpenAlex data is no longer being updated…it’s all Walden now, so there’s no comparator].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.