OpenAlex

What OpenAlex is

OpenAlex is an open scholarly catalog website at openalex.org for exploring research works, authors, institutions, sources, funders, topics, and citations. Its public site, explorer, API, and downloadable data are designed to make research metadata easier to search and reuse.

Research as a connected catalog

The project presents itself as a catalog of the global research system. Instead of treating publications as isolated records, OpenAlex connects works with people, institutions, journals and repositories, funders, topics, open access signals, references, and citation links.

Core entities

OpenAlex records describe entities such as works, authors, sources, institutions, topics, publishers, funders, and grants. These linked entities help users move from a paper to its author, from an institution to its output, or from a topic to a broader research landscape.

Explorer website

The explorer website is useful for searching and browsing without writing code. It helps users inspect research output, citation patterns, open access status, collaboration networks, and topic areas in a visual interface.

API access

The OpenAlex API is the main programmatic access point for the catalog. Developers and analysts can use it to retrieve records, filter research metadata, build dashboards, run literature discovery workflows, or connect OpenAlex data with local research information systems.

Full data snapshot

For larger projects, OpenAlex provides snapshot documentation for downloading a complete copy of the database. A snapshot matters when users need bulk analysis, local warehousing, reproducible pipelines, or queries that are too large for ordinary API calls.

Strengths and limits

OpenAlex is useful, but it still requires interpretation. Coverage, author disambiguation, institutional affiliation, abstracts, topics, document types, and citations can vary by source, language, field, publisher, repository, and metadata quality.

Why it matters

OpenAlex matters because research discovery and evaluation increasingly depend on metadata infrastructure. An open catalog gives libraries, funders, universities, researchers, journalists, and software teams a reusable alternative to closed scholarly databases.

WHOIS domain data

Data pulled: June 1, 2026 · View current WHOIS record

Domain

openalex.org

IP address

13.248.131.213

Registrar

GoDaddy.com, LLC

WHOIS server

whois.godaddy.com

Referral URL

http://www.whois.godaddy.com

Created

March 14, 2018

Updated

April 28, 2026

Expires

March 14, 2028

Nameservers

ns1.dnsimple.com (162.159.24.4); ns2.dnsimple.com (199.247.153.53); ns3.dnsimple.com (162.159.26.4); ns4.dnsimple.com (199.247.155.53)

Domain status

clientDeleteProhibited; clientRenewProhibited; clientTransferProhibited; clientUpdateProhibited

DNSSEC

unsigned