Academic Search Ultimate vs OpenAlex

Academic Search Ultimate is a multidisciplinary full-text database for scholarly research, with material spanning nearly all academic disciplines. It lists 10,199 active full-text journals and magazines, including 9,581 peer-reviewed journals; 5,873 active full-text journals are indexed in Web of Science or Scopus. The collection also includes 7,153 active global open access journals, plus periodicals, reports, books, conference proceedings and videos. Its video collection contains more than 6,700 videos from The Washington Post and other providers, and relevant titles may include ahead-of-print content. Through EBSCOhost, researchers can use basic and advanced search, citation assistance, saved searches and results, and subject browsing with access points in more than 30 languages. The EBSCO Mobile app supports searching, saving and sharing on iOS and Android. Institutional access is available; the product is also accessible on the web. It has no free plan, but a trial can be requested. Pricing is by request, with no subscription price shown.

OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of scholarly research, with a REST API for querying connected records such as works, authors, sources, institutions, and topics. API users can search, filter, sort, group, page through results, select fields, and retrieve individual entities. The complete database snapshot can be downloaded from Amazon S3 without an AWS account, and the data is released under the CC0 public-domain license. An official command-line tool supports bulk downloads with parallel transfers, checkpoints, rate limiting, retries, and resume. Full-text access provides PDFs and machine-readable TEI XML; each file download costs $0.01. Website exports include CSV, RIS, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects through the API. OpenAlex also offers Unpaywall's legacy-format open-access API, including a browser extension and integrations with SFX, EBSCO Discovery Service, and 360 Link. Its coverage includes journal articles, conference papers, books, chapters, datasets, dissertations, and preprints. OpenAlex is operated by a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and its code is open source.