OpenAlex Official CLI

Official command-line interface for OpenAlex. Download work metadata and full-text content (PDFs, TEI XML) in bulk.

Note: This package was formerly known as openalex-content-downloader. If you have that installed, please switch to openalex-official.

Installation

pip install openalex-official

Quick Start

# Download metadata for works matching a filter
openalex download \
  --api-key YOUR_API_KEY \
  --output ./results \
  --filter "topics.id:T10325"

# Download metadata + PDFs
openalex download \
  --api-key YOUR_API_KEY \
  --output ./results \
  --filter "topics.id:T10325" \
  --content pdf

# Download metadata + PDFs + TEI XML
openalex download \
  --api-key YOUR_API_KEY \
  --output ./results \
  --filter "topics.id:T10325" \
  --content pdf,xml

# Download specific works by ID or DOI
openalex download \
  --api-key YOUR_API_KEY \
  --output ./results \
  --ids "W2741809807,10.1038/nature12373"

# Download from a list of IDs via stdin
cat work_ids.txt | openalex download \
  --api-key YOUR_API_KEY \
  --output ./results \
  --stdin

# Download to S3
openalex download \
  --api-key YOUR_API_KEY \
  --storage s3 \
  --s3-bucket my-bucket \
  --s3-prefix openalex/ \
  --filter "topics.id:T12345"

# Check API key status
openalex status --api-key YOUR_API_KEY

Features

• Metadata-first approach - JSON metadata is always saved; content files are optional
• High-throughput async downloads - Configurable concurrency for millions of works
• Automatic checkpointing - Resume interrupted downloads without re-downloading
• Adaptive rate limiting - Automatically adjusts to API conditions
• Multiple storage backends - Local filesystem or S3
• Progress tracking - Rich terminal UI with live stats, or headless logging
• Flexible filtering - Use any OpenAlex filter syntax
• Multiple input modes - Filter, explicit IDs, or piped stdin
• DOI support - Auto-detects and resolves DOIs to OpenAlex work IDs

CLI Reference

openalex download

Download work metadata and optionally content (PDFs, TEI XML).

Option	Description	Default
--api-key	OpenAlex API key (required)	$OPENALEX_API_KEY
--output, -o	Output directory	./openalex-downloads
--storage	Storage backend: local or s3	local
--s3-bucket	S3 bucket name	-
--s3-prefix	S3 key prefix	""
--filter	OpenAlex filter string	None (all works)
--ids	Comma-separated work IDs or DOIs	-
--stdin	Read work IDs/DOIs from stdin	false
--content	Content to download: pdf, xml, or pdf,xml	None (metadata only)
--nested	Use nested folder structure (W##/##/)	false
--workers	Concurrent download workers (1-200)	50
--resume/--no-resume	Resume from checkpoint	true
--fresh	Ignore checkpoint, start fresh	false
--quiet, -q	Minimal output (log file only)	false
--verbose, -v	Extra debug output	false

openalex status

Check API key status and credit information.

Option	Description
--api-key	OpenAlex API key (required)

Filter Examples

# Recent articles
--filter "publication_year:>2020,type:article"

# Specific topic
--filter "topics.id:T12345"

# From a specific institution
--filter "authorships.institutions.id:I123456789"

# Open access only
--filter "open_access.is_oa:true"

# Combined filters
--filter "publication_year:2023,type:article,open_access.is_oa:true"

See OpenAlex filter documentation for all available filters.

File Organization

By default, files are saved flat in the output directory. Metadata is always saved as JSON:

output/
├── W2741809807.json     # metadata (always saved)
├── W2741809807.pdf      # content (if --content pdf)
├── W2741809807.tei.xml  # content (if --content xml)
├── W1234567890.json
└── .openalex-checkpoint.json

For large downloads (>10,000 files), use --nested to organize files in a nested structure that avoids filesystem issues:

output/
├── W27/
│   └── 41/
│       ├── W2741809807.json
│       └── W2741809807.pdf
├── W12/
│   └── 34/
│       └── W1234567890.json
└── .openalex-checkpoint.json

When downloading by DOI, files are named using the DOI (with / replaced by _):

output/
├── 10.1038_nature12373.json
└── 10.1038_nature12373.pdf

Checkpointing

The downloader automatically saves progress to .openalex-checkpoint.json in the output directory. If interrupted, run the same command again to resume.

To start fresh and ignore the checkpoint:

openalex download --api-key KEY --output ./data --fresh

Logging

All activity is logged to openalex-download.log in the output directory, regardless of terminal mode.

High-Throughput Deployment

The download speed is typically limited by network bandwidth, not the tool or API. On a typical home connection (~400 Mbps), expect ~10-15 files/sec (~1M files/day). To achieve higher throughput, deploy from a cloud environment.

Performance scaling:

Environment	Bandwidth	Workers	Expected Rate
Home connection	400 Mbps	50	~10-15 files/sec
Cloud VM (standard)	1-5 Gbps	100-150	~30-50 files/sec
Cloud VM (high-perf)	10+ Gbps	200-300	~60+ files/sec

Recommendations for large-scale downloads:

1. Run from cloud - Deploy on AWS EC2, GCP, or Azure VMs with high network bandwidth. Instances close to Cloudflare edge locations will have lower latency.

2. Increase workers - Use --workers 150 or higher to saturate available bandwidth. Monitor with verbose mode to find the optimal setting.

3. Use S3 storage - For very large downloads, stream directly to S3 instead of local disk:

   openalex download \
     --api-key KEY \
     --storage s3 \
     --s3-bucket my-corpus \
     --workers 200

4. Parallelize across machines - For the full corpus, run multiple instances with different filters (e.g., by publication year) on separate machines.

Roadmap

We plan to add more commands to the CLI, including:

• CSV/JSON export of search results
• More entity types beyond works

Have a feature request? Open an issue.

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• OpenAlex API key with sufficient credits

Documentation

Full documentation: docs.openalex.org

License

MIT