Exploring Open Research Information Infrastructure: Joining the OpenAlex Community and launching our systemwide pilot

By Maria Praetzellis / June 11, 2026

CDL is committed to supporting open research information infrastructure and exploring building open systems. Last year, through our Open Research Information (ORI) Connect initiative, we examined the mix of open and proprietary tools that CDL uses to support business intelligence, discovery, and scholarly communications. As part of that process, we took stock of the tools we use and concluded that, in order to make good on our organizational commitment to open scholarship, we need to be much more deliberate about committing ourselves to the use of open infrastructure wherever possible. That’s why we’re excited to share that CDL has joined OpenAlex as an organizational member, and we’re launching a pilot to explore how the platform can help support the scholarly communication work of the UC community.

What Is OpenAlex?

OpenAlex is a free, open index of the global research landscape, launched in 2022 by OurResearch, the non-profit behind Unpaywall and other open research tools. It includes data from Crossref, DataCite, ROR, and other sources to build a comprehensive view of scholarly works, authors, institutions, and journals. OpenAlex represents an open solution for the kinds of discovery and analysis that have traditionally required subscription services like Web of Science, Scopus, or Dimensions.

Our OpenAlex Membership

OpenAlex is a free service, open to the public to use. However, as an organizational member, we now have access to OpenAlex Partner, which includes:

High-throughput API access: Our organizational key supports up to 2 million API calls per day, enabling large-scale data retrieval and analysis.
Real-time data syncing: Premium API filters let us stay current with OpenAlex’s database on an ongoing basis rather than relying on quarterly snapshots.
The Affiliation editor: A member-exclusive tool that lets us curate and improve affiliation metadata for UC institutions, directly benefiting the accuracy of UC representation in the OpenAlex index.
Priority support: Users from the UCOP domain are flagged for priority assistance through the OpenAlex support system.

Launching a Systemwide Pilot

As part of our commitment to explore Open Research Information systems, we are setting up a pilot with interested groups across the UC system to explore how OpenAlex can meet their needs. We have capacity for a small number of participants in this first phase. If you work with research information data, whether for reporting, compliance, discovery, or analysis, and want to test what OpenAlex can do, we’d like to hear from you.

We can provide access in two ways: through our shared Organizational API Key (suitable for most exploratory use), or via one of five Power User API Keys, which offer higher throughput for more intensive work. Reach out, and we’ll help figure out which fits your needs.

This pilot is focused on exploring the different ways OpenAlex can serve participants throughout UC. Here are some concrete directions we’re already examining:

Tracking publishing trends: Using the API to analyze publishing patterns across campuses, journals, and subject areas.
Open access monitoring: Examining the OA status of UC research outputs to support compliance and strategy.
Affiliation data quality: Improving how UC units and campuses are represented in the OpenAlex index; corrections that flow downstream into many other tools and services.
Bibliometric analysis: Exploring citation patterns, research topic trends, and institutional collaborations.

If you have a use case that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these buckets, we want to know about it!

Additional Collaborations with OpenAlex

Joining as an organizational member isn’t the only way CDL is investing in OpenAlex. We’re also putting resources directly into the platform’s development. To serve the UC community well, OpenAlex needs to close specific gaps, and we’re well-positioned to move that work forward.

We’ve entered into a collaboration with OpenAlex to fund and advise development on two feature areas that expand what’s possible with the platform:

Collections: A way to create, save, and (eventually) share custom groupings of works, authors, institutions, and sources. A working prototype is already live on openalex.org, where you can create, edit, and use a collection as a filter in a search. For example, you can build a collection of 1,000 Elsevier sources and then view only the works published in them. Right now, collections are private to your account; this collaboration is helping move shareable, queryable collections up the roadmap (e.g., all UC-affiliated sources, or a curated set of works under a particular agreement). It’s a foundational feature for the kind of systematic analysis institutions need.

Screenshot of a working prototype on openalex.org — *A working prototype on* *openalex.org* *with a collection applied as a filter, narrowing a search to only works published in those journals.*

Corresponding author coverage: Institution-level attribution often depends on knowing who the corresponding author is; a detail that’s critical for analyzing publishing patterns under our open access agreements. OpenAlex’s current coverage of this data is incomplete. This work will quantify the gap, identify data sources and strategies to close it, and build a roadmap for improvement. While the work will prioritize UC-relevant papers, better data on corresponding authors benefits the entire OpenAlex community.