Review for MetaROR of ‘Market dynamics, governance and open research metadata in the AI era’ (2026).

OpenAlex is part of a wider ecosystem of databases collecting and providing open funding metadata, including OpenAIRE and EuropePMC. Here we compare the coverage of funding information in OpenAlex and OpenAIRE using two case studies.

With a grant from Wellcome, OpenAlex is working to improve its coverage of funding metadata. The three-year project started in September 2025, and the effects are already visible. Building on an earlier study, we show that OpenAlex is already performing almost as well as Dimensions.

Abstracts are increasingly important given the rise of large language models (LLM) and generative AI. While OpenAlex provides a source of open abstracts in addition to Crossref, the takedown of abstracts from OpenAlex by two major publishers points to an increased commodification of abstracts.