Open Knowledge Maps vs OpenAlex
Open Knowledge Maps
openknowledgemaps.orgOpenAlex
openalex.orgSide by side
| Figure | Open Knowledge Maps | OpenAlex |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | €40/mo | $1/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 9 | 9 |
| Spec score · Research Paper Discovery Tools | 7.2 (#21) | 8.9 (#2) |
| Founded | 2015 | OpenAlex's transparency page says Impactstory incorporated in North Carolina in 2012. |
Plans
Open Knowledge Maps
- Basic Membership — lower & middle income countries€480 a year
- Sustaining Membership — lower & middle income countries€780 a year
- Visionary Membership — lower & middle income countries€1,280 a year
- Basic Membership — high income countries (small organisations)€1,900 a year
- Sustaining Membership — high income countries (small organisations)€2,900 a year
- Basic Membership — high income countries (large organisations)€3,800 a year
- Visionary Membership — high income countries (small organisations)€5,400 a year
- Sustaining Membership — high income countries (large organisations)€5,800 a year
- Visionary Membership — high income countries (large organisations)€10,800 a year
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
Open Knowledge Maps
Open Knowledge Maps has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
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.