OpenAlex 2026 Roadmap - OpenAlex blog

"What we shipped in Q4

The Walden rewrite is done. OpenAlex now runs on a modern Databricks infrastructure that lets us ship faster and iterate on data quality in days instead of months.

We added 192 million new works from DataCite and repositories. OpenAlex now indexes 477millionworks—the largest connected repository of scholarship ever published.

On funders and awards: we created Awards as a first-class entity, extracted 27 million funder links from fulltext PDFs, and integrated 15 new funders directly.

What’s coming in Q1

For enterprise users: Credit-based API pricing launches this month. Different calls cost different amounts:

* a singleton (/works/w123) is 1 credit, 

* a list (/works?filter=foo:bar) is 10, 

* PDF content (coming this month!) is 100, 

* vector search is 1,000. (coming soon! email steve@ourresearch.org for early access!)

We’re also launching a sync service so you can pull daily updates in one chunk instead of polling millions of records.

For institutions: Affiliation matching curation launches in February. Members can edit the matching algorithm that links affiliation strings to their institution. Changes propagate to the API within a day—permanently improving the dataset for everyone.

We’re also launching two membership tiers at $5k and $20k/year that include ability to curate your own data in OpenAlex, training/consulting, and pro API keys with higher API access for your faculty.

For researchers: A complete rewrite of author name disambiguation ships by end of Q1. This has always been the hardest problem in bibliometrics. With today’s AI, we think we can build the most accurate system ever made."