OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts

In May 2021, Microsoft announced that it was discontinuing support for Microsoft Academic Graph, a free and widely-used Scientific Knowledge Graph (SKG). This was met with considerable concern, as MAG was viewed as difficult to replace with existing systems.  The OpenAlex project was created to address this concern. It launched as a drop-in replacement for MAG contemporaneously with MAG’s retirement on January 1st 2022.

Although still in its nascency, as a fully-open (100% open data, open API, open-source code) source of scholarly metadata, OpenAlex has potential to improve the transparency of research evaluation, navigation, representation, and discovery, adding to the growing list of other open and partly-open SKGs such as  OpenCitations,  AMiner,  PID Graph, Open Research Knowledge Graph,  Semantic Scholar, and the OpenAIRE research graph.