Fixing data errors

For your own author profile and affiliation matching there are self-serve fixes. For everything else, the fix is a ticket: file it at openalex.org/contact, and our AI agents turn it into a structured correction, verify it, and apply it. How that pipeline works is covered in the Fixing errors reference; this page is how to use it well.

How do I write a report that gets acted on?

Four things make a report fixable:

1. The record’s ID or URL (e.g. W2741809807 or the DOI) — not just a title.
2. What’s wrong — the specific field or claim.
3. What’s right — the correct value.
4. Evidence — a URL we can check.

“The OA status on openalex.org/W2741809807 says closed, but it’s free to read at peerj.com/articles/4375” is fixable in minutes. “Lots of my university’s papers are wrong” gives us nothing to check.

How do I fix a work’s open-access status?

The most common report — and about half of these reports are themselves wrong, usually because the reporter checked from inside their institution’s network, where paywalled articles look free. So first, check the article from outside your university network and VPN (your phone on cellular data works well). It’s really open if you can view the fulltext with no login, payment, or account creation, on a legal site (the publisher or a trusted repository). Watch the traps: journals that are open now but whose older content is closed; “PDF” buttons that lead to a paywall; free-with-an-account (not OA); Sci-Hub (also not OA).

If it passes that test, file a ticket and include the URL of the free-to-read copy — that URL is the fix. See Works in the reference for more, and Open access for how statuses are determined.

How do I fix errors in a source or journal profile?

Wrong metadata on a journal, a missing journal, a source’s OA classification — all ticket cases. File one with the source’s OpenAlex ID (how to find it), what’s wrong, and what’s right. If the journal is missing entirely, see Getting indexed.

Why is the date wrong, and how do I fix it?

Date metadata is genuinely messy — a paper can have a DOI-mint date, an acceptance date, a publication date, and an issue date, and preprints can precede the journal version by years. OpenAlex consistently uses the earliest date available on the record, which occasionally looks wrong even when it’s working as designed. We don’t support user curation of dates. If the underlying metadata is wrong, check Crossref first — fixes there flow into OpenAlex automatically. If you believe the error is on our end, file a ticket.

What about missing works?

If your institution seems to be missing works, that’s usually an affiliation-matching question — see the checklist. If a specific work is missing from OpenAlex entirely, file a ticket with its DOI; if it’s a whole journal or repository that’s missing, see Getting indexed.