Getting indexed

OpenAlex indexes works — publications, datasets, theses, and so on — by harvesting the big scholarly indexes: Crossref, DataCite, PubMed, and others, plus thousands of repositories. So “getting indexed” means getting your works into a place we already harvest.

How do I get my journal indexed in OpenAlex?

Get your articles into one of the indexes we harvest, and they’ll flow into OpenAlex automatically. For most journals that means registering DOIs through Crossref (or DataCite, for data-heavy publishing). Beyond OpenAlex, DOIs are infrastructure your articles should have anyway — they’re how citations, reference lists, and discovery services link to your work across the whole scholarly ecosystem.

Once your DOIs are registered, no separate OpenAlex submission is needed: new records show up as we harvest.

How do I get my repository indexed in OpenAlex?

First, check whether we already harvest your repository: go to openalex.org/sources?filter=type:repository and search for your repository’s name. If it’s listed, you’re in — we check it for new records as part of our regular harvest.

If it’s not listed, send us a support request at openalex.org/contact with your repository’s name and its OAI-PMH endpoint (or base URL), and we’ll look at adding it.

For how harvesting and matching actually work — and how your repository’s metadata affects them — see Repositories in the Data reference.

My journal or repository is indexed, but works are missing. What now?

For repositories, this is common and usually isn’t a harvesting failure — see Repositories for how to troubleshoot coverage. For journals, check that the missing articles have registered DOIs; if they do and they’re still absent after a few weeks, file a support request with a few example DOIs.