OpenAlex
 | |
| Producer | OurResearch |
|---|---|
| History | 2022 |
| Coverage | |
| Disciplines | Science, social science, arts, humanities (supports 256 disciplines) |
| Record depth | Citation inde xing, author, topic title, subject keywords, abstract, periodical title, author's address, publication year |
| Format coverage | Articles, reviews, editorials, chronologies, abstracts, proceedings (journals and book-based), technical papers |
| Links | |
| Website | openalex.org |
OpenAlexis a bibliographic catalogue of scientific papers, authors and institutions accessible inopen accessmode, named after theLibrary of Alexandria.It started operating in January 2022 byOurResearchas a successor of the terminatedMicrosoft Academic Graph.OpenAlex competes with commercial products such asClarivate'sWeb of ScienceorElsevier'sScopus,and is complemented byBibliometricstools and anAPI.[1][2]
History
[edit]On December 31, 2021, theMicrosoft Academic Graph(MAG) database stopped being updated.[3][4]The non-profit organizationOurResearchproposed the creation of an open accessbibliographic database,named OpenAlex, with the ambition of providing a fully open catalogue for the global research system.[5]OpenAlex was released in January 2022, including information from MAG as well as a free API.[6]Its name is inspired by theLibrary of Alexandria,which created the first bibliographic catalogue in human history.
In September 2023,Leyden Universityin theNetherlandsannounced that it would now use OpenAlex to establish its research institution ranking for 2024.[7]In December 2023, theSorbonne Universityannounced that it was deregistering fromScopusin favor of OpenAlex.[8]
In 2024, theFrench Ministry of Research and Higher Educationpledged to contribute financially to the project, considering it "as a crucial open science infrastructure".
By March 2024, OpenAlex included metadata for 209 million works such as journal articles and books; 13 million authors with ambiguous identities; metadata for 124,000 sites hosting works, including journals and online repositories; metadata for 109,000 institutions; and 65,000Wikidataconcepts, which are algorithmically linked to works using an automated multi-tag hierarchical classifier. In March of the same year, it announced that they had received a $7.5 million grant from the philanthropic initiativeArcadia,with the goal of making OpenAlex a real, open alternative to commercial solutions.[9]
In June 2024 a paper got wider audience when a team of researchers found fabricated metadata entered into theCrossrefdatabase, which is also sourced by Openalex. Metadata in the reported examples does not contain the real citations any more, but made up citations.[10][11]
Uses
[edit]OpenAlex is used by universities to measure the progress of their research teams in terms of publishing publications or meeting sustainable development goals. OpenAlex relies onDOAJdata as well asUnpaywalldata to indicate the status (closed or open) and route used for open access (open access in gold, green, bronze or hybrid versions), and in Aurora's requests to qualify the works indexed according to thesustainable development goalsdefined by theUnited Nations.[12]It also uses information fromCrossrefandORCID.In 2024 the API had a usage volume of 115 million monthly queries.
A 2024 study shows that OpenAlex is particularly good at inde xing Diamond-criterion journals, with more than 12,500 indexed titles, including more than 60% of all Diamond OA journals not found in WoS or Scopus.[13]
References
[edit]- ^Singh Chawla, Dalmeet (2022-01-24)."Massive open index of scholarly papers launches".Nature.doi:10.1038/d41586-022-00138-y.PMID35075274.S2CID246278314.
- ^Simard, Marc-André & Basson, Isabel & Hare, Madelaine & Larivière, Vincent & Mongeon, Philippe. (2023).The value of a diamond: Understanding global coverage of diamond Open Access journals in Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAlex to support an open future.
- ^"Next Steps for Microsoft Academic - Expanding into New Horizons".Microsoft Research.4 May 2021.Retrieved2021-05-28.
- ^"Fossil-record bias and huge research database".Nature.601(7893): 303. 2022-01-20.Bibcode:2022Natur.601..303..doi:10.1038/d41586-022-00103-9.ISSN0028-0836.S2CID256820124.
- ^Jason (2021-05-08)."We're building a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph".OurResearch blog.Retrieved2024-06-01.
- ^Piwowar, Heather (2022-01-06)."OpenAlex launch!".OurResearch blog.
- ^Brooks, James (2023-09-15)."Leiden rankings to add open-source version in 2024".Research Professional News.Retrieved2024-06-01.
- ^Clavey, Martin (2024-03-04)."La recherche française parie sur OpenAlex pour briser l'emprise d'Elsevier et Clarivate".Next(in French).Retrieved2024-06-01.
- ^Price, Gary (2024-03-14)."Funding: OurResearch Receives $7.5 Million Grant From Arcadia To Establish OpenAlex, a Milestone Development For Open Science".Library Journal infoDOCKET.Retrieved2024-06-01.
- ^Besançon, Lonni; Cabanac, Guillaume; Labbé, Cyril; Magazinov, Alexander (2024-05-06)."Sneaked references: Fabricated reference metadata distort citation counts".Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.doi:10.1002/asi.24896.ISSN2330-1635.
- ^"Hacking Scientific Citations - Schneier on Security".schneier.Retrieved2024-07-17.
- ^Priem, Jason; Piwowar, Heather; Orr, Richard (2022). "OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts".arXiv:2205.01833[cs.DL].
- ^Price, Gary (2024-04-02)."Preprint:" Open Access Coverage of OpenAlex, Scopus and Web of Science "".Library Journal infoDOCKET.Retrieved2024-06-01.