Research impact & bibliometrics · OurResearch
OpenAlex
Free, fully open index of scholarly works, authors, venues and institutions, built as a successor to Microsoft Academic Graph.
OpenAlex is maintained by OurResearch, a US nonprofit, and funded through grants (including from Arcadia and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) rather than subscriptions. It emerged after Microsoft Academic Graph shut down and has grown into a comprehensive open graph of works, authors, institutions, sources and concepts, with better coverage of preprints and non-Western, non-English scholarship than most commercial indexes. Everything is available through a free REST API and full data snapshots for anyone to download and run locally, which has made it a common backend for other tools and research-evaluation dashboards rather than an end-user product itself. Because it's free and open, readers should know who funds it and that coverage and disambiguation quality, while improving, can still trail long-established commercial indexes on some metrics.
At a glance
| Vendor | OurResearch |
|---|---|
| Pricing model | Free |
| Free tier | Yes |
| Deployment | Cloud |
| Open source | Yes (MIT) |
| Best for | Anyone needing free, bulk-accessible scholarly metadata without an institutional subscription. |
Pricing
Free API and full data downloads, funded by grants; a paid premium tier exists for very high-volume commercial API use.
Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.
Features
- Open REST API and downloadable full data snapshots
- Entity graph of works, authors, institutions and sources
- Strong coverage of preprints and non-Western scholarship
- ORCID and ROR identifier linking
- Concept and topic tagging via machine classification
- No paywall or login required for core use
- Powers third-party research-evaluation tools
Integrations
Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026