The Library of Alexandria created the first catalog of all human knowledge 2,300 years ago, and a team of fewer than 20 people just finished the modern version and made it free for the entire planet.
It is called OpenAlex. The name is not an accident.
The ancient library had the Pinakes, a catalog mapping every scroll, every author, every subject. When the library fell, the map of what humanity knew fell with it.
For the last two decades, that map existed again, but it was locked up.
Elsevier owns Scopus. Clarivate owns Web of Science. If your university could not afford the subscription, you could not see the structure of science itself. Entire countries were priced out of knowing what research existed.
OpenAlex indexes 474 million scholarly works. Every author disambiguated. Every citation traced. Every institution and funder connected. It updates with roughly 50,000 new works every day.
The whole thing is CC0. Not just free to search. Free to download, copy, sell, and build on. The API allows 100,000 requests a day without an account.
The ancient library burned and the catalog was lost for two millennia.
The new one cannot burn. Anyone can hold a copy.
https://t.co/peUYYpucnc