OpenAlex is a free and open catalogue of the world's scholarly research system. Its name is inspired by the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt. The project is run by the nonprofit OurResearch and aims to make scholarly communication better available, fairer, more inclusive, more affordable and more transparent.
OpenAlex indexes over 250M scholarly works from 250k sources, with extra coverage of humanities, non-English languages, and the Global South. It also offers access to it's source code and underlying data. Its complete dataset is free under the CC0 license, which allows for transparency and reuse.
OpenAlex makes use of PIDs (Persistent Identifiers) to get data from different open sources, including Crossref, ORCID and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
One of the core values of OpenAlex is openness. All data behind OpenAlex is freely and openly available under a CC0 license, which means that anybody can use and reuse the data. Be aware that this only applied to the metadata (i.e. the title of a work, year in which it is published, etc.). OpenAlex also contains metadata about articles that are not published open access and therefore not freely accessible for everybody. The company behind OpenAlex is a non-profit organisation, OurResearch.