Openness & sustainability
Open Science is an international movement to make science, and its benefits, accessible to all of society — scientists, entrepreneurs, non-profits, and the public. For introductory reading, see CDL’s 8 Pillars of Open Science and LERU’s Open Science Roadmap.
The license
OpenAlex data is free to everyone, everywhere, under a No Rights Reserved license — CC0. There is no “personal use only” carve-out and no permission to ask: the data is in the public domain.
Open means accessible
If you put something at the center of a maze and don’t lock the maze entrance, it’s technically open — but hardly accessible. Accessibility is part of the mission, at every level of technical capacity:
- Users with big-data capacity can download the entire dataset, free.
- Beginner coders can use the easy-to-use API.
- Non-technical users get the full dataset through the web interface.
The sustainability model
Keeping OpenAlex completely open and free takes a deliberate sustainability plan, which leans heavily on the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).
In a market where data is treated as “the new oil,” value is usually captured by limiting access. We take the opposite view: scholarly metadata is critical to a thriving society, so the data itself is completely open and freely reusable. Value comes instead from our time and services — higher-volume, faster access for commercial providers and heavy users who need it. OpenAlex was established with a grant from Arcadia; through paid services, we expect to reach financial sustainability by 2028.
Our co-founder and CEO Jason Priem discusses the approach, and the most common questions about it, in this video.
Insurance against capture
Open data and open source also work as a guarantee to the community. As a non-profit, OpenAlex isn’t an attractive corporate-takeover target — and if something tragic happened to the team, or a future board tried to sell off assets, anyone could take what we’ve built and continue the mission. Several groups already have the capability to do exactly that. The mission doesn’t depend on us.