Some OpenAlex updates

[Jason Portenoy]

Hello OpenAlex Community!

There's been a lot of activity lately, and we have some new features and other news to share! Here’s a summary, with details below:

• OpenAlex webinar series—first one tomorrow!

• Next snapshot will be available Sept 22

• Sustainable development goals available in works

• Countries_distinct_count available in works

• Institutions_distinct_count available in works

• Institution lineage available in institutions

• Is_accepted and is_published available in works.locations

• Raw author name available in works.authorships

• UI/website updates—see below

OpenAlex webinars

As announced previously, we are launching a monthly webinar series to present about how to use OpenAlex and to engage directly with the community. The focus will be on research intelligence and bibliometrics, but all are welcome to attend. The first one is tomorrow (Thursday, Sept 14) at 12pm ET! For more information and to register and get the Zoom link: https://openalex.org/webinars

Next snapshot will be available Sept 22

The next snapshot has an expected release date of September 22. It will include bug fixes, and a number of new features—keep reading to learn more about some of them.

Sustainable development goals available in works

The United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals are a collection of goals at the heart of a global "shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet." We have started using a machine learning model to tag works with their relevance to these goals based on our OpenAlex SDG Classifier. The sustainable_development_goals are now available in works (in the API and in the upcoming snapshot). Learn more in the documentation here. 

New attributes available in OpenAlex entities

Some new attributes are available in OpenAlex entities related to author affiliations:

• Countries_distinct_count is available in works

• Institutions_distinct_count is available in works

• Institution lineage is available in the dehydrated Institution object, which can be seen in Institutions, Author.last_known_institution, and Work.authorships.institutions. This uses data from ROR to identify any parent institutions that an institution has.

Some other new attributes:

• Is_accepted and is_published is now available in Work.locations—these are derived from the location’s version

• Raw_author_name is available in Work.authorships—this is the raw author string extracted from the work record, used (in part) to link the Author record for the work

All of the above are available in the API and will be part of the upcoming snapshot.

UI/website updates

Some of you have noticed that we have been delayed in our beta launch of the OpenAlex UI. While we, unfortunately, were not able to have it ready for our target of July, it remains a high priority, and we are expecting to launch it later this year. Stay tuned for more!

Thanks again for your support as part of the OpenAlex community! We look forward to the first webinar tomorrow, and to more exciting times ahead!

Sincerely,

OpenAlex Team