OpenPharos: multilingual paper alerts built on OpenAlex — seeking feedback and beta testers

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Hideki Baba

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Mar 15, 2026, 6:49:55 PM (8 days ago) Mar 15

to OpenAlex Community

Hi everyone,

My name is Hideki, and I work in R&D at a materials manufacturer in Japan. I've built a service called OpenPharos on top of OpenAlex, and I'd be grateful for feedback from this community.

I checked with Steve before posting, and he said the community Google Group could be a good place to share this.

The problem I'm trying to address is simple: for many non-English-speaking researchers, there is still a lot of friction both in setting up literature alerts and in reviewing results that arrive in English. This is something I've felt myself in R&D work in Japan: I want to keep up with the literature, but the friction is often high enough that it doesn't happen consistently.

OpenPharos monitors OpenAlex for newly added works matching a researcher's interests and sends email alerts with:

Titles translated into the user's preferred language (English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese)
AI-generated summaries for CC-BY works only, using the abstract as input
Links to the original source
Translation links to support faster triage

Users describe their interests in plain language, and the system helps generate structured searches using OpenAlex topics and keywords.

A few implementation details:

Data source: OpenAlex API (/works endpoint)
Discovery: OpenAlex subfield filters combined with keyword searches over titles and abstracts
Freshness: Scheduled alerts currently use publication-date windows to detect newly relevant papers
Post-retrieval: App-side filtering for journals and exclude terms, plus relevance scoring based on include keywords and citation signals, and deduplication
API access: OpenAlex API with an API key
Attribution: Product-level attribution to OpenAlex, with links to original article pages

For institutions:

I think this could also be relevant for libraries or research support teams serving multilingual communities. If a university wanted to offer localized paper alerts to its researchers, something like OpenPharos could provide that without requiring custom infrastructure. I'd especially welcome thoughts on whether that kind of use case would be valuable.

What I'm looking for:

Feedback on whether this solves a real problem — including "this wouldn't work because..." responses
Beta testers who want to try it, especially non-English-speaking researchers or those who work with them
Ideas on whether this could be useful for libraries, research support teams, or international programs

Happy to answer any questions about the implementation or how I'm using OpenAlex.

(The name OpenPharos comes from the Lighthouse of Alexandria — a small nod to OpenAlex.)