Category Archives: oa.mag

[2205.01833] OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts

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OpenAlex is a new, fully-open scientific knowledge graph (SKG), launched to replace the discontinued Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). It contains metadata for 209M works (journal articles, books, etc); 2013M disambiguated authors; 124k venues (places that host works, such as journals and online repositories); 109k institutions; and 65k Wikidata concepts (linked to works via an automated hierarchical multi-tag classifier). The dataset is fully and freely available via a web-based GUI, a full data dump, and high-volume REST API. The resource is under active development and future work will improve accuracy and coverage of citation information and author/institution parsing and deduplication.

 

Massive open index of scholarly papers launches

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“An ambitious free index of more than 200 million scientific documents that catalogues publication sources, author information and research topics, has been launched.

The index, called OpenAlex after the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt, also aims to chart connections between these data points to create a comprehensive, interlinked database of the global research system, say its founders. The database, which launched on 3 January, is a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), a free alternative to subscription-based platforms such as Scopus, Dimensions and Web of Science that was discontinued at the end of 2021.

“It’s just pulling lots of databases together in a clever way,” says Euan Adie, founder of Overton, a London-based firm that tracks the research cited in policy documents. Overton had been getting its data from various sources, including MAG, ORCID, Crossref and directly from publishers, but has now switched to using only OpenAlex, in the hope of making the process easier….”

OpenAlex launch! – OurResearch blog

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“OpenAlex launched this week! (January 3rd 2022 for those reading from the future)

As expected:

We’re now pulling in new content on our own. Until now, we’ve been getting new works, authors, and other entities from MAG. Now that MAG is gone, we’re gathering all of our own data from the big wide internet.

The new REST API is launched! This is a much faster and easier way to access the OpenAlex database than downloading and installing the snapshot. It’s completely open and free–you don’t even need a user account or token.

We’ve now got oodles of new documentation here: https://docs.openalex.org/

Slight change of plan:

The MAG Format snapshot is now hosted for free, thanks to the AWS Open Data program. This will cover the data transfer fees (which turned out to be $70!) so you don’t have to. Here are the new instructions on how to download the MAG format snapshot to your machine.

We are extending the beta period for OpenAlex; we’ll emerge from beta in February. This is mostly in response to discovering issues with the coverage and structure of existing data sources including MAG. Extending the beta reflects the fact that the data will improve significantly between now and February.

Huge exciting news:

OpenAlex was built to offer a drop-in replacement for MAG. We’re doing that. But today, we’re also unveiling some moves toward a more innovative future for Openalex:

We’ve now built around a simple new five-entity model: works, authors, venues (journals and repositories), institutions, and concepts. Everything in OpenAlex is one of these entities, or a connection between them. Each type of entity has its own API endpoint.

We’ve got a new Standard Format for the snapshot, one that’s closely tied to both the five-entity model the API. In the future, this will become the only supported format. The MAG format is now deprecated and will go away on July 1, 2022. …”

Welcome! – OpenAlex documentation

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“OpenAlex is a fully open catalog of the global research system. It’s named after the ancient Library of Alexandria.

The OpenAlex dataset describes scholarly entities and how those entities are connected to each other. There are five types of entities:

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Works are papers, books, datasets, etc; they cite other works

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Authors are people who create works

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Venues are journals and repositories that host works

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Institutions are universities and other orgs that are affiliated with works (via authors)

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Concepts tag Works with a topic

Together, these make a huge web (or more technically, heterogeneous directed graph) of of hundreds of millions of entities and over a billion connections between them all….”

OpenAlex: The open catalog to the global research system

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“OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of the world’s scholarly papers, researchers, journals, and institutions — along with all the ways they’re connected to one another.

Using OpenAlex, you can build your own scholarly search engine, recommender service, or knowledge graph. You can help manage research by tracking citation impact, spotting promising new research areas, and identifying and promoting work from underrepresented groups. And you can do research on research itself, in areas like bibliometrics,science and technology studies, and Science of science policy

Because we think all research should be free and open, OpenAlex is free and open itself, and we’re built on a fully Open Source codebase.

We believe the global research system is one of humankind’s most beautiful creations. OpenAlex aims to make that whole beautiful creation available to everyone, everywhere….

Let’s start way back at the beginning, with the ancient Library of Alexandria. Working create a Universal Library, they didn’t just gather knowledge — they made it useful by indexing it in the world’s first library catalog, the Pinakes. That’s what we’re trying to do, too, and so our name is an homage to them!

Fast forward a few millenia: OpenAlex had been a dream at our little nonprofit for a long time, but two doors opened simultaneously in May 2021. First, we received a generous, $4.5M grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Second, Microsoft announced it would shutter Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), which much of the community has come to rely upon as our best index of scholarly communication. So, we had the means and the opportunity, and we ran with it!…”

OpenAlex: The open catalog to the global research system

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“OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of the world’s scholarly papers, researchers, journals, and institutions — along with all the ways they’re connected to one another.

Using OpenAlex, you can build your own scholarly search engine, recommender service, or knowledge graph. You can help manage research by tracking citation impact, spotting promising new research areas, and identifying and promoting work from underrepresented groups. And you can do research on research itself, in areas like bibliometrics,science and technology studies, and Science of science policy

Because we think all research should be free and open, OpenAlex is free and open itself, and we’re built on a fully Open Source codebase.

We believe the global research system is one of humankind’s most beautiful creations. OpenAlex aims to make that whole beautiful creation available to everyone, everywhere….

Let’s start way back at the beginning, with the ancient Library of Alexandria. Working create a Universal Library, they didn’t just gather knowledge — they made it useful by indexing it in the world’s first library catalog, the Pinakes. That’s what we’re trying to do, too, and so our name is an homage to them!

Fast forward a few millenia: OpenAlex had been a dream at our little nonprofit for a long time, but two doors opened simultaneously in May 2021. First, we received a generous, $4.5M grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Second, Microsoft announced it would shutter Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), which much of the community has come to rely upon as our best index of scholarly communication. So, we had the means and the opportunity, and we ran with it!

Our first beta data dump release was in in mid-November, 2021. OpenAlex will remain in beta until our official launch on January 3, 2022 — just in time to take up the mantle from MAG, which closes up shop December 31st….”

The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing, summer 2021

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“Despite being so crucial, citations — the pieces of metadata that serve as references to works — are often ignored in discussions of types of open knowledge. Historically, citations and their cross-references have been laboriously collected (by hand, then by computational techniques) in bibliographic indexes. These indexes, once published in serial print volumes, are today generally offered as web-based, paywalled subscription products by scholarly entities or for-profit companies. Indexing and abstracting services are big business: Web of Science, an academic journal and proceedings index that has existed since the 1960s, can cost subscribing libraries hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Web of Science is currently owned by Clarivate, which in 2020 had revenues of 1.2 billion USDundefined from its portfolio of analytics and intellectual property management tools that monetize the research process….”

The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing

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“In recent years, there has been a push to openly license citation metadata to better enable large-scale analyses and discoverability of scholarly work. The “Initiative for Open Citations” (I4OC),undefined launched in 2017, has led the way in helping publishers share citations to their works under a public domain CC0 license. As of early 2021, over a billion citations from one scholarly article to another are collected in public domain databases, a major shift from just a few years earlier.undefined These open databases provide the backbone for new discovery tools, and are used by academics training artificial intelligence tools. Open corpora like the Microsoft Academic Graph are themselves widely cited.undefined However, Microsoft Academic Graph will be shuttered in 2021; despite their importance, new citation projects are reliant on continued funding and support by their host, and longevity is not always guaranteed….

Wikidata is a freely licensed and editable online database of linked data, with 94 million items as of June 2021.undefined Like its sister project Wikipedia, it has a vibrant multilingual volunteer community that develops and maintains it, and is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata also includes bibliographic metadata: as of June 2021, nearly 40 million items on Wikidata represented publications, accounting for 43% of all items.undefined These are a combination of semi-automated uploads of citations from other open databases, items about notable publications that have their own Wikipedia articles, and items added manually by editors. Wikidata is also attractive for libraries, archives, and cultural institutions that want to make their metadata more openly available and reusable, and there are several ongoing projects to incorporate Wikidata into library and archival cataloging processes and connect Wikidata to new open knowledgebases….”

The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing

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“In recent years, there has been a push to openly license citation metadata to better enable large-scale analyses and discoverability of scholarly work. The “Initiative for Open Citations” (I4OC),undefined launched in 2017, has led the way in helping publishers share citations to their works under a public domain CC0 license. As of early 2021, over a billion citations from one scholarly article to another are collected in public domain databases, a major shift from just a few years earlier.undefined These open databases provide the backbone for new discovery tools, and are used by academics training artificial intelligence tools. Open corpora like the Microsoft Academic Graph are themselves widely cited.undefined However, Microsoft Academic Graph will be shuttered in 2021; despite their importance, new citation projects are reliant on continued funding and support by their host, and longevity is not always guaranteed….

Wikidata is a freely licensed and editable online database of linked data, with 94 million items as of June 2021.undefined Like its sister project Wikipedia, it has a vibrant multilingual volunteer community that develops and maintains it, and is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata also includes bibliographic metadata: as of June 2021, nearly 40 million items on Wikidata represented publications, accounting for 43% of all items.undefined These are a combination of semi-automated uploads of citations from other open databases, items about notable publications that have their own Wikipedia articles, and items added manually by editors. Wikidata is also attractive for libraries, archives, and cultural institutions that want to make their metadata more openly available and reusable, and there are several ongoing projects to incorporate Wikidata into library and archival cataloging processes and connect Wikidata to new open knowledgebases….”

MAG replacement update: meet OpenAlex! – OurResearch blog

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“Last month, we announced that we’re launching a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) this December–just before MAG itself will be discontinued.  We’ve heard from a lot of current MAG users since then. All of them have offered their support and encouragement (which we really appreciate), and all have also all been curious to learn more. So: here’s more! It’s a snapshot of what we know right now.  As the project progresses, we’ll have more details to share, keeping everyone as up-to-date as we can….”

Open Science nonprofit OurResearch receives $4.5M grant from Arcadia Fund – OurResearch blog

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“The grant, which follows an 2018 award for $850,000, will help expand two existing open-source software projects, as well as support the launch of two new ones:

Unpaywall, launched in 2017, has become the world’s most-used index of Open Access (OA) scholarly papers. The free Unpaywall extension has 400,000 active users, and its underlying database powers OA-related features in dozens of other tools including Web of Science, Scopus, and the European Open Science Monitor. All Unpaywall data is free and open.
Unsub is an analytics dashboard that helps academic libraries cancel their large journal subscriptions, freeing up money for OA publishing. Launched in late 2019, Unsub is now used by over 500 major libraries in the US and worldwide, including the national library consortia of Canada, Australia, Greece, Hong Kong, and the UK. 
JournalsDB will be a free and open database of scholarly journals. This resource will gather a wide range of data on tens of thousands of journals, emphasizing coverage of emerging open venues. 
OpenAlex will be a free and open bibliographic database, cataloging papers, authors, affiliations, citations, and journals. Inspired by the ancient Library of Alexandria, OpenAlex will strive to create a comprehensive map of the global scholarly conversation.  In a recent blog post, the team announced that OpenAlex will be released in time to serve as a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph, whose discontinuation was also recently announced….”

We’re building a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph – Our Research blog

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“This week Microsoft Research announced that their free bibliographic database–Microsoft Academic Graph, or MAG for short–is being discontinued. This is sad news, because MAG was a great source of open scholcomm metadata, including citation counts and author affiliations. MAG data is used in Unsub, as well as several other well-known open science tools.

Thankfully, we’ve got a contingency plan for this situation, which we’ve been working on for a while now. We’re building a successor to MAG. Like all our projects, it’ll be open-source and the data will be free to everyone via data dump and API. It will launch at the end of the year, when MAG is scheduled to disappear.

It’s important to note that this new service will not be a perfect replacement, especially right when it launches. MAG has excellent support for conference proceedings, for example; we won’t match that for a while, if ever.  Instead, we’ll be focusing on supporting the most important use-cases, and building out from there. If you use MAG today, we’d love to hear what your key use-cases are, so we can prioritize accordingly. Here’s where you can tell us.

We plan to have this launched by the time MAG disappears at year’s end. That’s an aggressive schedule, but we’ve built and launched other large projects (Unpaywall, Unsub) in less time. We’ve also got a good head start, since we’ve been working toward this as an internal project for a while now….”

The rise of the “open” discovery indexes? Lens.org, Semantic Scholar and Scinapse | Musings about librarianship oa.scite

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“In this blog post, I will talk specifically on a very important source of data used by Academic Search engines – Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and do a brief review of four academic search engines – Microsoft Academic, Lens.org, Semantic Scholar and Scinapse ,which uses MAG among other sources….

We live in a time, where large (>50 million) Scholarly discovery indexes are no longer as hard to create as in the past, thanks to the availability of freely available Scholarly article index data like Crossref and MAG.”