OpenAlex Snapshot

Mirror of the OpenAlex scholarly metadata snapshot — a free, open catalogue of 250M+ scholarly works, 100M+ authors, and related entities.

Hosted on HuggingFace via Xet for content-addressable deduplication.

Source: s3://openalex (public, anonymous S3 bucket)

Dataset subsets

Each entity type is a separate subset (config):

Config	Description	Shards
works	Scholarly works (papers, datasets, etc.)	2,127
authors	Authors of scholarly works	738
institutions	Universities, research orgs	61
publishers	Academic publishers	51
sources	Journals, repositories, conferences	42
awards	Grant/funding awards	20
concepts	Legacy concept taxonomy (Wikidata)	3
topics	Topic taxonomy	1
domains	Top-level topic domains	1
fields	Topic fields	1
subfields	Topic subfields	1
funders	Funding organisations	1

Data format

Each shard is a gzip-compressed JSON Lines file at:

data/{entity}/updated_date=YYYY-MM-DD/part_XXXX.jsonl.gz

The .jsonl.gz extension allows the HuggingFace dataset viewer to detect the inner format automatically. On S3, files are named part_XXXX.gz; the download pipeline renames them on save.

Each line is a JSON object representing one entity record. Fields vary by entity type. See the OpenAlex data model for field definitions.

Example: Work record fields

id, doi, title, display_name, publication_year, type, language, authorships, concepts, topics, keywords, cited_by_count, referenced_works, related_works, locations, open_access, funders, awards, mesh, sustainable_development_goals, counts_by_year, updated_date, and more.

Sync and extraction pipeline

The sync/ directory contains a Python pipeline for downloading from S3 and extracting relationship tables to Parquet:

1. Download: python3 -m sync.download sync [--entity X] — syncs from s3://openalex (public, anonymous)
2. Extract: python3 -m sync.extract extract [--entity X] --workers 6 — converts .jsonl.gz to nested parquet sub-tables

Extraction supports --slice-index N --slice-total M to partition work across machines.

Adding new entity types

OpenAlex occasionally adds new entities. To support a new one:

1. Download: python3 -m sync.download sync --entity {entity}
2. Schema: Add entity + relationship schemas to sync/schemas.py
3. Extraction: Add dispatch entry to _ENTITY_DISPATCH in sync/extract.py
4. Nesting: Add singular→plural entry to _ENTITY_SINGULAR_TO_PLURAL in sync/common.py
5. Commit: Stage and push

License

OpenAlex data is released under CC0 1.0 Universal. See the OpenAlex terms for details.