OpenAlex vs PubMed
OpenAlex
openalex.org
PubMed
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.govSide by side
| Figure | OpenAlex | PubMed |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $1/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 9 | 1 |
| Spec score · Academic Research Databases | 8.9 (#2) | 7.5 (#20) |
| API | The REST API exposes entity endpoints with filtering, searching, sorting, grouping, pagination, field selection and single-record lookup. | PubMed provides the E-utilities API for accessing its data. |
| Founded | OpenAlex's transparency page says Impactstory incorporated in North Carolina in 2012. | 1996 |
| Full text | The full-text service provides PDFs and machine-readable TEI XML, with per-file downloads priced at $0.01 each. | PubMed does not include full-text journal articles, but records often link to full text available from other sources. |
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
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.
PubMed
PubMed has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.