User-created Overview

Almost every entity in OpenAlex is minted by OpenAlex: we create the works, disambiguate the authors, assign the topics. User-created entities are the exception — things you mint.

They matter because they close the loop: OpenAlex builds the map, and users push back on it and build on top of it.

The user-created entities

• Collections — saved sets of entities (a reading list, a department’s authors, a corpus for an analysis) that a user assembles and can re-query.
• Curations — user-submitted corrections to native entities: fixing an author profile, correcting an affiliation, flagging a wrong open-access status. A curation records who changed what, when, and its review status, and — once accepted — flows into the entity it corrects.

Because these come from users rather than the pipeline, they don’t have a “How we build it” provenance story; instead their pages describe who can create them, what states they move through, and how they feed back into OpenAlex.