CORE vs OpenAlex
CORE
core.ac.ukOpenAlex
openalex.orgSide by side
| Figure | CORE | OpenAlex |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $1/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 11 | 9 |
| Spec score · Academic Research Databases | 8.8 (#3) | 8.9 (#2) |
| Company size | LinkedIn lists CORE as a nonprofit education organisation with 11–50 employees and headquarters in Milton Keynes. | LinkedIn lists OpenAlex as a nonprofit research-services organization with 2–10 employees. |
| Founded | The Open University records the CORE project period as February–July 2011, and contemporary OU news says the service launched in 2011. | OpenAlex's transparency page says Impactstory incorporated in North Carolina in 2012. |
| Integrations | CORE says its Discovery tool can integrate with repositories, and its API documentation includes examples and wrappers for common programming languages. | Website exports support CSV, RIS for EndNote or Zotero, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects directly through the API. |
| Support | Starting members receive general support, while Supporting and Sustaining members receive increasing levels of technical support. | Member includes community support, Member+ includes ticket-based help for critical API bugs, and Partner includes full ticket-based support for API and data issues. |
| What it does | CORE aggregates and indexes open-access scholarly metadata and full texts so people can search, read and reuse research. | OpenAlex is an open index and knowledge graph covering scholarly works, authors, sources, institutions, topics and related entities. |
Plans
CORE
- StartingPriced on request
- SupportingPriced on request
- SustainingPriced on request
- CORE APIFree
- CORE API — free access without registrationFree
- Institution and Enterprise API trialFree
- Starting membershipFree
- Starting membershipFree
- CORE API — registered accessPriced on request
- Supporting membershipPriced on request
OpenAlex
- Pay as you go$1 a month
- Member$5,000 a year
- Member+$10,000 a year
- Partner$20,000 a year
- FreeFree
- Pay as you go$1, paid once
- Member$5,000 a year
- Member+$10,000 a year
- Partner$20,000 a year
In their own words
CORE
CORE is a multidisciplinary discovery service for scholarly work gathered from repositories, preprint servers and journals. Its search covers research papers, journal articles, preprints, theses, dissertations, conference proceedings, reports and books. CORE says its collection holds 449 million searchable papers, including 57 million full texts. Researchers and the public can search this material; developers can use the API for real-time access to metadata and full texts. The CORE Dataset supports downloading data for analysis and text mining on an organisation’s own infrastructure, though access is limited to users representing organisations registered in non-sanctioned countries. Individuals can use the API instead. CORE Discovery is available as a browser extension, repository plugin and API, and CORE Recommender suggests related articles in repositories, journal systems and web interfaces. Free API access costs nothing, subject to rate limits of one batch request or five single requests per 10 seconds. Starting membership costs nothing for data providers. The service describes itself as not-for-profit and community-governed.
OpenAlex
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.