OpenAlex competes with commercial products such as Clarivate's Web of Science or Elsevier's Scopus, and is complemented by Bibliometrics tools and an API.

[10] In 2024, the French Ministry of Research and Higher Education pledged to contribute financially to the project, considering it "as a crucial open science infrastructure".

In March of the same year, it announced that they had received a $7.5 million grant from the philanthropic initiative Arcadia, with the goal of making OpenAlex a real, open alternative to commercial solutions.

[11] In June 2024 a paper got wider audience when a team of researchers found fabricated metadata entered into the Crossref database, which is also sourced by Openalex.

[12][13] OpenAlex is used by universities to measure the progress of their research teams in terms of publishing publications or meeting sustainable development goals.