Publishers
A publisher is a company or organization that distributes works — the parent behind the sources (journals, conference series, repositories) where works appear. OpenAlex tracks about 10,700 publishers, arranged in a parent/child hierarchy so that an imprint rolls up to its group. A publisher’s OpenAlex ID looks like P4310319965; fetch one at api.openalex.org/publishers/P4310319965 (Springer Nature).
How it’s made
Where publishers come from
Publishers are native entities: OpenAlex decides which real-world organizations count as distinct publishers and mints an ID for each. The publisher list is grounded in two open registries — ROR (the Research Organization Registry) and Wikidata — which supply the canonical name, homepage, country, logo, and the external IDs OpenAlex carries in ids. Grounding publishers in ROR/Wikidata is what keeps “Springer Nature,” “Springer Verlag,” and “Springer-Verlag” from splintering into three separate publishers.
The hierarchy
Publishers form a tree. A large publishing group sits at the top (hierarchy_level 0, parent_publisher null); its imprints and subsidiaries hang beneath it at higher levels, each pointing up at its parent. lineage lists the full chain of ancestors from the publisher itself up to the root, so you can roll any imprint’s works up to the group that owns it. This mirrors the messy reality of scholarly publishing, where one conglomerate may own dozens of imprints that still print under their own names.
Relationship to sources
A publisher doesn’t publish works directly — it publishes them through sources. Each source records its publisher as its host_organization, and the reverse view (every source a publisher hosts) is available at the publisher’s sources_api_url. A publisher’s works_count and cited_by_count are the totals summed across all the sources it hosts.
Roles
A single real-world organization can act as more than one kind of OpenAlex entity: a university press is a publisher, but the university is also an institution and sometimes a funder. roles links those alter egos together, so you can hop from the publisher record to the institution or funder record for the same organization.
Failure modes
Because publishers are inferred, they can be wrong: an imprint may be attached to the wrong parent, two records for one publisher may not yet be merged, or a small or new publisher may be missing from ROR/Wikidata and so absent here. Hierarchy is also incomplete — not every imprint has been slotted under its group. These are curatable.
Attributes
This is the canonical dictionary of every attribute on a publisher object. Attributes shared with other entities (id, ids, display_name, works_count, cited_by_count, summary_stats, counts_by_year, created_date, updated_date) are documented once on Common attributes; publisher-specific notes are below.
id
String. The OpenAlex ID for this publisher, e.g. https://openalex.org/P4310319965. See Common attributes.
ids
Object. All known external identifiers for this publisher, as URIs where possible. Publisher keys: openalex, ror (ROR ID), wikidata. See Common attributes.
display_name
String. The publisher’s name, e.g. Springer Nature. See Common attributes. Filterable and searchable; not available as a group_by.
alternate_titles
List. Other names the publisher is known by, including names in other languages and former names.
hierarchy_level
Integer. The publisher’s depth in the hierarchy. 0 is a root (top-level) publisher; each step down toward an imprint adds one. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.
parent_publisher
String. The OpenAlex ID of this publisher’s immediate parent in the hierarchy, or null for a root publisher. Filterable, sortable, and groupable.
lineage
List. OpenAlex IDs tracing the full ancestry, from this publisher up to its root — the publisher itself is always the first element. Filter lineage:P4310319965 to find a group and all its imprints.
country_codes
List. The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes where the publisher operates. A list (not a single code) because large publishers span multiple countries.
homepage_url
String. The URL of the publisher’s homepage.
image_url
String. A URL to the publisher’s logo or a representative image (usually from Wikimedia Commons).
image_thumbnail_url
String. Like image_url, but scaled down for a thumbnail (a width parameter is appended).
works_count
Integer. The number of works published across all the sources this publisher hosts. See Common attributes.
cited_by_count
Integer. Total citations received across all works this publisher has published. See Common attributes.
summary_stats
Object. Precomputed bibliometric indicators (2yr_mean_citedness, h_index, i10_index) over the publisher’s works. See Common attributes.
counts_by_year
List. Works published and citations received per year for roughly the last ten years. See Common attributes.
roles
List. The other OpenAlex entities that are the same real-world organization — each a { role, id, works_count } object where role is one of publisher, institution, or funder. See Roles. Filter on roles.id to find every entity sharing a role with a given ID.
sources_api_url
String. A ready-made API URL listing every source this publisher hosts (i.e. sources?filter=host_organization.id:<id>). A convenience link, not a stored value.
created_date
String. The date this publisher was added to OpenAlex (YYYY-MM-DD). See Common attributes.
updated_date
String. The ISO 8601 UTC timestamp of the last change to this publisher object. See Common attributes.
In the API
The Publishers endpoint is at api.openalex.org/publishers. Fetch a single publisher by ID — /publishers/P4310319965 — or a list, and filter, search, sort, group, and page over the fields above. To find every source a publisher hosts, filter sources on host_organization.id; to roll up an imprint’s works to its group, filter publishers on lineage. For the full list of endpoints see the endpoints index.