OpenAlex vs Project MUSE
OpenAlex
openalex.orgProject MUSE
muse.jhu.eduSide by side
| Figure | OpenAlex | Project MUSE |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $1/mo | $174.58/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 9 | 6 |
| Spec score · Academic Research Databases | 8.9 (#2) | 8.6 (#6) |
| Founded | OpenAlex's transparency page says Impactstory incorporated in North Carolina in 2012. | LinkedIn lists Project MUSE as founded in 1995. |
| Integrations | Website exports support CSV, RIS for EndNote or Zotero, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects directly through the API. | Discovery and linking partners include EBSCO, Ex Libris/Clarivate, Google Scholar, OCLC WorldCat, WorldShare, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. |
| 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. | Customer support is available by email and contact form Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Eastern time. |
| What it does | OpenAlex is an open index and knowledge graph covering scholarly works, authors, sources, institutions, topics and related entities. | Project MUSE is an online scholarly content platform aggregating humanities and social-science journals, books, and related research materials. |
Plans
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
Project MUSE
- MUSE Journal Collection trialFree
- Premium Journals Collection (school libraries)$2,095 a year
- 2027 PLUS+ Package$13,121.40 a year
- Individual articles and issuesPrice not published
- Institutional journal collectionsPriced on request
- MUSE Journal Collection subscriptionPrice not published
In their own words
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.
Project MUSE
Project MUSE provides scholarly books, journals, and other digital resources in the humanities and social sciences, from university presses and nonprofit scholarly publishers. Its catalog includes more than 800 journals and over 100,000 books from 400 publishers, along with over 6,000 open access books and more than 100 open access journals. Users can search across resources and filter by content type, language, journal, date, or publisher. Reading formats include HTML, PDF, and EPUB; EPUB files must be downloaded and opened in a compatible reader. MUSE describes subscribed and purchased content as DRM-free, with unlimited access, simultaneous use, downloading, and printing. Institutions can authenticate through IP address, Shibboleth, referring URLs, or a secure proxy. People without institutional access can use MyMUSE to save or email citations and receive content alerts, and may buy selected online articles and issues. Those individual purchases provide perpetual MyMUSE access, but sales are final. Pricing is on request, with a 45-day trial. A school-library Premium Journals Collection is listed at $2,095 a year.