Should Dspace continue supporting OpenAlex?

[Fatih Güneş]

OpenAlex support came to Dspace with V9 on May 2025. I have build two university integration and data migration on OpenAlex. It seemed more robust by having pids for entities. Than in Feb 2026 Openalex converted to usage based pricing.

They seem to offer a free plan including 1$ credit, but I was surprised to see that even the filter function is blocked by API if you are not in premium plans. There are two plans which cost 10K for member, and 20K for partners per year. 

I accept that an open source project can have premium services for sustainability. But limiting main functions feel like bait and switch.

What do you think?

Fatih

[Kevon Muhoozi]

Great discussion start here @Fatih Güneş this then is challenging to the open source community if the api is commercialised....
I earlier thought that it was free when I reached out to them.
But according to what they say is " We’re hosting PDFs and TEI XML for our 60M open-access works. You can search and filter for works of interest, filter to get just ones with PDFs, and then download the PDFs in bulk—all with the API.  " maybe is the reason why the api key is commercialised.

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[Erica Finch]

Thanks for flagging this! I missed this announcement. On the one hand I'm sad about the introduction of usage based pricing, and on the other hand I'm glad that they're thinking ahead and planning for sustainability, particularly with all the changes ahead thanks to the prolifteration of AI tools. I don't think they're wrong when they close out their blog post saying that we're moving into an era where people aren't going to visit openalex.org anymore to search, they're going to be vibe-coding their own custom interfaces instead. 

I'm curious about your comment that the filter function is blocked by the API if you're not on a premium plan. Their pricing model seems to indicate that filtering is $0.0001 per call, so as long as you haven't spent through your $1/day allowance you should be able to utlize the filter function for "free"? 

On the whole I think the important things are transparency in pricing and commitment to open and community-driven infrastructure, and overall I think that OpenAlex is the best option out there. Unless there are others I'm not thinking of? I also think that even with just a $1/day free account, our IR could run workflows that utilize the OpenAlex API without going over that budget (granted I work at a small institution).

I don't like the somewhat cavaliere FAQ, Will prices change? Yes, probably. The point of this model is to keep our prices tightly linked to our costs, and our costs will likely change with new tech, new use cases, and new data. We don't have room in our budgets for steep increases year to year, we need stability and predictability in pricing in order to feel comfortable investing our time and money in building workflows on something. This answer doesn't give me feelings of predictability or stability--I hope it's just a wording issue and not an indication that prices might suddenly fluctuate upward.

Curious to hear more thoughts on this. Is anyone out there using the OpenAlex API and have you stuck to $1/day or less?

Erica