How you can help keep OpenAlex free

Next month, we’re submitting a renewal application for our main grant. This grant helps keep OpenAlex free to you. We need your help to get the renewal. There are two ways to help:

  1. Write a short testimonial 
  2. Subscribe to our Premium service

Details below:

1. Testimonial

We need to show our funder that we’re making a real and necessary impact. Testimonials are amazing for that. Could you write us a quick testimonial? We need 5-7 sentences that answer these questions:

  • Who are you?
  • What problem is OpenAlex solving for you?
  • How did you solve it before us?
  • Why is OpenAlex a better solution?
  • What’s a concrete good outcome of using OpenAlex?
  • Would you recommend OpenAlex to others?

Here’s an (imaginary) example:

CatCademia connects academic researchers to share research ideas and cat pictures. For this we need publication lists for all users. Originally, users had to curate their own lists, which was a big pain point. Now we use OpenAlex’s open API to auto-generate users’ publication lists at signup. Upon launching this feature, we saw an immediate increase in user retention and cat-picture sharing. We highly recommend OpenAlex to anyone who needs high-quality, open scholarly data.

You can submit your testimonial here. Thanks!

2. Premium

We recently launched a paid upgrade to our service called OpenAlex Premium. Premium offers:

  • Faster updates, so you can get fresher data,
  • Higher API limits, so you can use the API more, and
  • Priority support for faster and more detailed help.

Our funder (correctly, imho) wants to see we’re on the road to self-sustainability. So, we’re asking you to take a look at Premium and see if it’s something that would help you. 

If not, no worries–we’re delighted to make most of what we do free, and we want users to enjoy that. But if it looks useful, please get in touch ASAP! We’re offering hefty early-adopter discounts to folks that sign up this month.

Thanks very much for your time and support!

Best,

The OpenAlex Team

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