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. Created in January 2022 by OurResearch, starting from a bibliographic database provided free of charge by Microsoft, the initiative 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

History

On December 31, 2021, the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) database stopped being updated. [3] [4] 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. [5] OpenAlex was released in January 2022, including information from MAG as well as a free API. [6] Its name is inspired by the Library of Alexandria, which created the first bibliographic catalogue in human history.

In September 2023, Leyden University in the Netherlands announced that it would now use OpenAlex to establish its research institution ranking for 2024. [7] In December 2023, the Sorbonne University announced that it was deregistering from Scopus in favor of OpenAlex. [8]

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. [9]

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. [10] 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. [11]

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.

A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebrew religious literature. Legal citation indexes are found in the 18th century and were made popular by citators such as Shepard's Citations (1873). In 1961, Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, first the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). American Chemical Society converted its printed Chemical Abstract Service into internet-accessible SciFinder in 2008. The first automated citation indexing was done by CiteSeer in 1997 and was patented. Other sources for such data include Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Elsevier's Scopus, and the National Institutes of Health's iCite.

Scopus is an abstract and citation database launched by the academic publisher Elsevier in 2004.

<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.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is an annual publication by Clarivate. It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science Core Collection. It provides information about academic journals in the natural and social sciences, including impact factors. JCR was originally published as a part of the Science Citation Index. Currently, the JCR, as a distinct service, is based on citations compiled from the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index. As of the 2023 edition, journals from the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Emerging Sources Citation Index have also been included.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BASE (search engine)</span> Academic search engine

BASE is a multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on free and open-source software such as Apache Solr and VuFind. It harvests OAI metadata from institutional repositories and other academic digital libraries that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and then normalizes and indexes the data for searching. In addition to OAI metadata, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

<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. Until 1997, it was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is currently owned by Clarivate.

<i>New Journal of Physics</i> Academic journal

New Journal of Physics is an online-only, open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research in all aspects of physics, as well as interdisciplinary topics where physics forms the central theme. The journal was established in 1998 and is a joint publication of the Institute of Physics and the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. It is published by IOP Publishing. The editor-in-chief is Andreas Buchleitner (Albert Ludwigs University). New Journal of Physics is part of the SCOAP3 initiative.

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.

<i>Medical Physics</i> (journal) Academic journal

Medical Physics is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research on medical physics. The first issue was published in January 1974. Medical Physics is an official journal of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, the Canadian Organization of Medical Physicists, the Canadian College of Physicists in Medicine and the International Organization for Medical Physics. The editor-in-chief is John M. Boone.

<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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenCitations</span>

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

<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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clarivate</span> American analytics company

Clarivate Plc is a British-American publicly traded analytics company that operates a collection of subscription-based services, in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics; business / market intelligence, and competitive profiling for pharmacy and biotech, patents, and regulatory compliance; trademark protection, and domain and brand protection. In the academy and the scientific community, Clarivate is known for being the company that calculates the impact factor, using data from its Web of Science product family, that also includes services/applications such as Publons, EndNote, EndNote Click, and ScholarOne. Its other product families are Cortellis, DRG, CPA Global, Derwent, MarkMonitor, CompuMark, and Darts-ip, and also the various ProQuest products and services.

<i>Journal of Horticultural Sciences</i> Academic journal

The Journal of Horticultural Sciences is a biannual peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal covering all branches of horticulture. It was established in 2006 and is published by the Society for Promotion of Horticulture. The journal contains review articles, research papers, and short communications. The editor-in-chief is Rajiv Kumar.

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). Being a diamond open access journal, it covers all areas of electrical engineering and computer science. Its editor-in-chief is Muhammet Uzuntarla.

Turkish Journal of Physics is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published bimonthly by Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). Being a diamond open access journal, it covers all areas of physics. Its editor-in-chief is Oğuz Gülseren.

References

  1. Singh Chawla, Dalmeet (2022-01-24). "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. "Next Steps for Microsoft Academic - Expanding into New Horizons". Microsoft Research. 4 May 2021. Retrieved 2021-05-28.
  4. "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. ISSN   0028-0836. S2CID   256820124.
  5. Jason (2021-05-08). "We're building a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph". OurResearch blog. Retrieved 2024-06-01.
  6. Piwowar, Heather (2022-01-06). "OpenAlex launch!". OurResearch blog.
  7. Brooks, James (2023-09-15). "Leiden rankings to add open-source version in 2024". Research Professional News. Retrieved 2024-06-01.
  8. Clavey, Martin (2024-03-04). "La recherche française parie sur OpenAlex pour briser l'emprise d'Elsevier et Clarivate". Next (in French). Retrieved 2024-06-01.
  9. 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. Retrieved 2024-06-01.
  10. 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].
  11. Price, Gary (2024-04-02). "Preprint: "Open Access Coverage of OpenAlex, Scopus and Web of Science"". Library Journal infoDOCKET. Retrieved 2024-06-01.