OpenAlex API: Search 250M+ Academic Papers for Free (No Key Required)

Last month I needed citation data for a research project. Google Scholar blocks scraping. Semantic Scholar has rate limits. Then I found OpenAlex — and it changed everything. What Is OpenAlex? OpenAlex is a free, open catalog of 250M+ academic papers, authors, institutions, and concepts. No API key. No authentication. No rate limits (well, 100K/day, but that's generous). It's maintained by the nonprofit OurResearch (the folks behind Unpaywall). Think of it as the Wikipedia of academic metadata. Why Should You Care? If you work with: Academic research — find papers, citations, co-author networks Market research — track R&D trends by analyzing publication patterns AI/ML — build training datasets from paper abstracts Competitive intelligence — see what universities/companies are publishing ...then OpenAlex is your new best friend. Quick Start: Your First API Call No setup. No signup. Just curl: curl "https://api.openalex.org/works?search=machine+learning&per_page=3" That returns 3