OpenAlex
Background: OpenAlex is a project of the non-profit organization, OurResearch. It launched in 2022 as a free and open catalog of the world's scholarly papers, researchers, journals, and institutions — along with all the ways they're connected to one another.
Mission: The founders believe all research should be free and open to everyone, everywhere. Its code is fully open-source and allows users to build their own scholarly search engine, recommender service, or trend detector. It also allows researchers to track impact, spot emerging fields, and identify key groups to better understand how scholarship works.
Community over Commercialization:
“Our philosophy is to be a lot more inclusive and comprehensive and to allow users to filter out what you don't want. Commercial product philosophy tends to be more of gatekeeping and deciding what should be included. The result is that their data is very under-representative of the Global South for example, and non-English works. So, a big advantage of our approach is that it is more inclusive and doesn’t shut out people.”
“Operating in open is so central to what we do. Our nonprofit is completely open and transparent. You can look up our tax records and grants. Our code is all open-source. Our data is completely free and you can use it any way you want.”
“When it comes to community, we’re trying to retrain our users in our community to understand how tight we want our community to be, especially people who are used to using tools that are subscription services. They're not used to acting like a community to come to the data providers to say something doesn’t look right. When people come to us with an error, we want to be able to say, ‘Okay, we’ll fix that.’ That's sort of a radical idea.”
“We want to have discussions with our community. We recently made big changes to the way our taxonomy – classifying things as journal articles, conference articles or book chapters. We did a redesign and we might do more iterations. We welcomed comments from the community, and we want to have those types of discussions.”
“There is a sense of goodwill from the community—and it’s a growing community [in support of OpenAlex]. We’ve had so many people rooting for us just from the start because they want to see us move in this direction. They want someone behind this who has these values of community.”
“Our community members include the bibliometrics community and the science of science researchers. OpenAlex has been on their radar since before it launched, so they are really open to it too. We are also reaching out to universities, research offices, university libraries, startups and enterprise projects that can make use of this data. There are so many people there who just seem so grateful for our existence and the way we operate. That is really gratifying.”
-Jason Portenoy, senior data engineer, OpenAlex