OpenAlex

Last updated

OpenAlex
OpenAlex-logo-5.2de7053c.png
Producer OurResearch
History2022;2 years ago (2022)
Coverage
DisciplinesScience, social science, arts, humanities (supports 256 disciplines)
Record depthCitation indexing, author, topic title, subject keywords, abstract, periodical title, author's address, publication year
Format coverageArticles, reviews, editorials, chronologies, abstracts, proceedings (journals and book-based), technical papers
Links
Website openalex.org

OpenAlex is a bibliographic catalogue of scientific papers, authors and institutions accessible in open access mode, named after the Library of Alexandria. It started operating in January 2022 by OurResearch as a successor of the terminated Microsoft Academic Graph. OpenAlex competes with commercial products such as Clarivate's Web of Science or Elsevier's Scopus, and is complemented by Bibliometrics tools and an API. [1] [2]

Contents

Because of its use of artificial intelligence and automatic algorithms to index articles, OpenAlex contains many superfluous or false entries, often resulting in catalogue entries that do not reflect scientific community standards for publication. For example, OpenAlex indexes a thread on an automotive enthusiast website [3] as a closed-access journal article in the biomedical engineering field: titled thump in drive train as I begin to drive forward. 245 A/T and written by the author DogsRGood. [4]

History

On 31 December 2021, the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) database stopped being updated. [5] [6] The non-profit organization OurResearch proposed the creation of an open access bibliographic database, named OpenAlex, with the ambition of providing a fully open catalogue for the global research system. [7] OpenAlex was released in January 2022, including information from MAG as well as a free API. [8] Its name is inspired by the Library of Alexandria, which created the first bibliographic catalogue in human history.

In September 2023, Leiden University in the Netherlands announced that it would now use OpenAlex to establish its research institution ranking for 2024. [9] In December 2023, the Sorbonne University announced that it was deregistering from Scopus in favor of OpenAlex. [10]

In 2024, the French Ministry of Research and Higher Education pledged 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 65,000 Wikidata concepts, 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 initiative Arcadia, with the goal of making OpenAlex a real, open alternative to commercial solutions. [11]

In June 2024 a paper got wider audience when a team of researchers found fabricated metadata entered into the Crossref database, which is also sourced by Openalex. Metadata in the reported examples does not contain the real citations any more, but made up citations. [12] [13]

Uses

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 on DOAJ data as well as Unpaywall data 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 the sustainable development goals defined by the United Nations. [14] It also uses information from Crossref and ORCID. In 2024 the API had a usage volume of 115 million monthly queries.

A 2024 study shows that OpenAlex is particularly good at indexing 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. [15]

Related Research Articles

CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital object identifier</span> ISO standard unique string identifier for a digital object

A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; they also fit within the URI system. They are widely used to identify academic, professional, and government information, such as journal articles, research reports, data sets, and official publications.

Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004. An ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is considered to significantly benefit their users in terms of continuous improvent in coverage, search/analysis capabilities, but not in price. Free database The Lens completes the triad of main universal academic research databases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliometrics</span> Statistical analysis of written publications

Bibliometrics is the application of statistical methods to the study of bibliographic data, especially in scientific and library and information science contexts, and is closely associated with scientometrics to the point that both fields largely overlap.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Scholar</span> Academic search service by Google

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crossref</span> Nonprofit open digital infrastructure organization

Crossref is a nonprofit open digital infrastructure organization for the global scholarly research community. It is the largest digital object identifier (DOI) Registration Agency of the International DOI Foundation. It has 19,000 members from 150 countries representing publishers, libraries, research institutions, and funders and was launched in early 2000 as a cooperative effort among publishers to enable persistent cross-platform citation linking in online academic journals. As of July 2023, Crossref identifies and connects 150 million records of metadata about research objects made openly available for reuse without restriction. They facilitate an average of 1.1 billion DOI resolutions every month, and they see 1 billion queries of the metadata every month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web of Science</span> Online subscription index of citations

The Web of Science is a paid-access platform that provides access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Lens</span> Online patent and academic database

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The Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications is a diamond open access peer-reviewed scientific journal covering the subject of graph algorithms and graph drawing. The journal was established in 1997 and the current co-editors-in-chief are Emilio Di Giacomo and Martin Nöllenburg. It is published by Brown University and is a member of the Free Journal Network. It is abstracted and indexed by Scopus and MathSciNet.

OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization that creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data, code, and governance. OurResearch is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Arcadia Fund.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic Torrents</span> File-sharing website

Academic Torrents is a website which enables the sharing of research data using the BitTorrent protocol. The site was founded in November 2013, and is a project of the Institute for Reproducible Research. The project is said to be similar to LOCKSS but with a focus on "offering researchers the opportunity to distribute the hosting of their papers and datasets to authors and readers, providing easy access to scholarly works and simultaneously backing them up on computers around the world."

Semantic Scholar is a research tool for scientific literature powered by artificial intelligence. It is developed at the Allen Institute for AI and was publicly released in November 2015. Semantic Scholar uses modern techniques in natural language processing to support the research process, for example by providing automatically generated summaries of scholarly papers. The Semantic Scholar team is actively researching the use of artificial intelligence in natural language processing, machine learning, human–computer interaction, and information retrieval.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Academic</span> Online bibliographic database

Microsoft Academic was a free internet-based academic search engine for academic publications and literature, developed by Microsoft Research in 2016 as a successor of Microsoft Academic Search. Microsoft Academic was shut down in 2022. Both OpenAlex and The Lens claim to be successors to Microsoft Academic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Initiative for Open Citations</span>

The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is a project launched publicly in April 2017, that describes itself as: "a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data and to make these data available." It is intended to facilitate improved citation analysis.

E-Theses Online Service (EThOS) is a bibliographic database and union catalogue of electronic theses provided by the British Library, the National Library of the United Kingdom. As of February 2022 EThOS provided access to over 500,000 doctoral theses awarded by over 140 UK higher education institutions, with around 3,000 new thesis records added every month until the British Library cyberattack forced the service to be temporarily taken offline.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenCitations</span> Project to publish open access citations

OpenCitations is a project aiming to publish open bibliographic citation information in RDF. It produces the "OpenCitations Corpus" citation database in the process.

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<i>Life Science Alliance</i> Academic journal

Life Science Alliance is a peer-reviewed, open access and not-for-profit journal for the biomedical and life sciences. EMBO Press, Rockefeller University Press and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press jointly established the journal in 2018. It is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. The journal is currently edited by the Executive Editor Eric Sawey.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine</span>

The State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine, SSTL is the main academic library of Ukraine and is part of the system of scientific and technical information of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. The purpose of the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine activity is to promote the implementation of state policy in the field of education, science and culture, and to ensure the access of scientists, specialists, and citizens to sources of scientific and technical information.

Dimensions is a database of abstracts and citations and of research grants, which links grants to resulting publications, clinical trials and patents. Dimensions is part of Digital Science - a technology company headquartered London, United Kingdom. The company focuses on strategic investments into startup companies, that support the research lifecycle.

References

  1. ↑ Singh Chawla, Dalmeet (24 January 2022). "Massive open index of scholarly papers launches". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-00138-y. PMID   35075274. S2CID   246278314.
  2. ↑ 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.
  3. ↑ "RWD - thump in drive train as I begin to drive forward. 245 A/T". Archived from the original on 6 October 2024.
  4. ↑ "OpenAlex: thump in drive train as I begin to drive forward. 245 A/T". Archived from the original on 6 October 2024.
  5. ↑ "Next Steps for Microsoft Academic – Expanding into New Horizons". Microsoft Research. 4 May 2021. Retrieved 28 May 2021.
  6. ↑ "Fossil-record bias and huge research database". Nature. 601 (7893): 303. 20 January 2022. Bibcode:2022Natur.601..303.. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-00103-9. ISSN   0028-0836. S2CID   256820124.
  7. ↑ Jason (8 May 2021). "We're building a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph". OurResearch blog. Retrieved 1 June 2024.
  8. ↑ Piwowar, Heather (6 January 2022). "OpenAlex launch!". OurResearch blog.
  9. ↑ Brooks, James (15 September 2023). "Leiden rankings to add open-source version in 2024". Research Professional News. Retrieved 1 June 2024.
  10. ↑ Clavey, Martin (4 March 2024). "La recherche française parie sur OpenAlex pour briser l'emprise d'Elsevier et Clarivate". Next (in French). Retrieved 1 June 2024.
  11. ↑ Price, Gary (14 March 2024). "Funding: OurResearch Receives $7.5 Million Grant From Arcadia To Establish OpenAlex, a Milestone Development For Open Science". Library Journal infoDOCKET. Retrieved 1 June 2024.
  12. ↑ Besançon, Lonni; Cabanac, Guillaume; Labbé, Cyril; Magazinov, Alexander (6 May 2024). "Sneaked references: Fabricated reference metadata distort citation counts". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. arXiv: 2310.02192 . doi:10.1002/asi.24896. ISSN   2330-1635.
  13. ↑ "Hacking Scientific Citations - Schneier on Security". www.schneier.com. Retrieved 17 July 2024.
  14. ↑ 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].
  15. ↑ Price, Gary (2 April 2024). "Preprint: "Open Access Coverage of OpenAlex, Scopus and Web of Science"". Library Journal infoDOCKET. Retrieved 1 June 2024.
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