Open Alex (the name Alex comes from the ancient Library of Alexandria) is a not for profit tool used to open up research for all. It is a free to use dataset containing over 250 million scholarly works. Unlike subscription databases it contains works from all over the globe, not just limited to the Global North.
It is being used by institutions to gather citations from its research in one place, rather than having to search multiple databases. Open Alex pulls in millions more open access outputs than other commercial sources due to where it collects it’s data from.
The main benefits of Open Alex are:
- Huge datasets, more than Scopus, PubMed or Web of Science.
- Citations are more discoverable as they are contained in one place
- The dataset can be pulled into Elements so more outputs can be claimed by LSHTM authors
- Institutions can measure their outputs against peers
- Metadata can be produced on each work to understand what the research is about.
- Open Alex can classify scholarly works, so they are linked by topic, subject or research type
It works by pulling together all the research outputs; journal articles, books, book chapters or dataset ect. from registries like Crossref and Datacites. It then links this data to institutions, authors or journal titles using the relevant PID (Persistent Identifier), ROAR, ORCID or ISSN.
The data from Open Alex is freely available, usually under a COO license. The use of its API is also free to use, meaning that researchers and administrators can build up a list of citations based on topic, geographical location or institutions.
