As 2024 comes to a close, we’re taking the opportunity to reflect on the year behind us. And what a year it has been for OpenAlex!
It’s hard to believe that it was only one year ago when we launched the Beta of our web interface and the first University, The Sorbonne, announced that they were replacing their proprietary database with OpenAlex.
Since then the team has worked hard to meet the evolving needs of our communities of users. Below are some of the highlights of 2024.
Organization:
- We received a 5-year grant from Arcadia totalling $7.5M to establish OpenAlex as a sustainably open index of the global research ecosystem
- We received a 2-year grant from the Navigation Fund totaling $688k to enhance the OpenAlex user interface
- We hired a Chief Operating Officer (Kyle Demes) and Senior Frontend Developer (Brett Lockspeiser)
- Our Premium subscriptions exceeded our first year’s sustainability target by 25%
Data:
- We started parsing fulltext PDFs to add more affiliation and reference metadata
- We started matching references without DOIs (we now have 2.5B citations)
- We added HAL as a primary source for new works
- We started ingesting DataCite as a primary source. We now have 6.4M DataCite records (we’ll have them all in a few months)
- We enhanced metadata accuracy for work type, publication year, author, institution, source, open access status, and more
- Our data was adopted by three major University rankings:
- Our data was featured in a Science News article examining the sustainability of APC feeds paid by researchers
Product:
- We launched our Beta User Interface
- We launched a new aboutness classification system (topics → subfields → fields → domains)
- We launched new normalized citation metrics (field-weighted citation impact and citation percentiles) to facilitate comparison across fields and years.
- We introduced user curation for affiliation, author, source, and work-level metadata and have already received more than 10k requests
- We expanded our offerings of paid services to help us get to sustainability faster
- We laid the foundation for an exciting new analytics product we’re looking forward to showing off early next year
Community (you):
- Monthly users of OpenAlex.org have grown from 28k at the beginning of the year to 78k, now representing 440k visits per month!
- Our first OpenAlex User Meeting was a huge success with 27 presentations from OpenAlex users in diverse organizations around the world
- We attended 9 conferences to promote OpenAlex and engage with our user community globally: Research Analytics Summit, CARA, BRIC, ICSSI, Make Data Count, LIS, STI, SRAI, The Charleston Conference and were truly humbled to see presenters and vendors at every conference using OpenAlex data!
- We launched a YouTube channel which now has 49 videos, 736 subscribers, and almost 25,000 views!
- Over 500 publications mention or reference OpenAlex and that number grows daily!
- We hosted an open call for our first Community Advisory Board where 50+ stellar nominees received almost 1,400 votes from the community– stay tuned for an announcement of results in early 2025
None of this would have been possible without all of you. So thank you! For your continued support, ideas, engagement, criticism, cheerleading, and collaboration. We’re looking forward to continuing to work together to build off these successes in 2025. Until then, Happy Holidays to you and yours.
Sincerely,
The OpenAlex Team
