Upcoming changes to OpenAlex Authors

[Jason Portenoy]

Hello OpenAlex community!

Next month we’ll unveil a rewrite of our author disambiguation system. When we do, all old OpenAlex Author IDs will disappear and be replaced by new ones.

The new system is way more accurate, with a better machine-learning model to identify authors, a smarter strategy for author assignments for new works, and a much better integration with ORCID data when it is available. 

Because it’s such a huge improvement, we have to completely replace all the old IDs with new ones. For most users, no response is needed; you’ll just notice that author disambiguation is way more accurate. Yay! But if you’re saving and linking to specific author IDs (like https://openalex.org/A123) in ways that assume persistence, you’ll need to update those IDs, because they’ll stop working (specifically, they’ll return 404 errors).

Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to making the change!

Cheers,

Jason Portenoy

[Trang Le]

Thank you for this update, Jason! Stoked about the new algorithm! Will keep an eye out for any breaking changes.

[Ashish Uppala]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for the update. Besides the IDs, will there be any changes to the models?

If we've been using the API to consume changes daily through the updated timestamp, I assume we'll want to pause it when the new system goes live to re-ingest via Snapshot, correct? Will there be any changes in the snapshot structure, or will it just be the same as before but with a significantly larger # change files since I presume this affects most records?

Knowing the planned go-live date once you know will be useful so I can pause our API ingestion and do a full snapshot re-ingestion on our side.

Ashish

[Jason Portenoy]

Hi Ashish,

Some of these details are still TBD--- including the go-live date. We'll discuss more as that date gets closer.

Thanks for working with us on this!

-Jason