Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-openalexgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-SkillsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-openalex)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-openalex"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-openalex/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-openalex"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-openalex.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00076 | $0.04250 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00030 | $0.01700 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00015 | $0.00850 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00425 |
Grade A, and why
alterlab-openalex scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Makes network callslowCapability
Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.
allowed-tools: Read WebFetch Bash(curl:*) Bash(python:*) How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 498 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
OpenAlex Database
Overview
OpenAlex is a comprehensive open catalog of 300M+ scholarly works (the default "core" corpus; corpus=all adds roughly 60% more, mostly datasets and repository records), authors, institutions, topics, sources, publishers, and funders. This skill provides tools and workflows for querying the OpenAlex API to search literature, analyze research output, track citations, and conduct bibliometric studies.
When to Use This Skill
- Searching the scholarly literature across all disciplines (keyword, semantic, or filtered by year, OA status, type)
- Finding works by an author, institution, funder, or source via their OpenAlex/ORCID/ROR/ISSN IDs
- Citation counts, citing works, and bibliometric or trend analysis (group_by aggregations)
- Checking open-access status and locations of papers, or batch-resolving DOIs to metadata
Does NOT Trigger
| Scenario | Use Instead |
|---|---|
| Biomedical literature search with MeSH terms, PMIDs, or PubMed Central full text | alterlab-pubmed |
| Building a citation / co-citation map around seed papers | alterlab-citation-graph |
| Checking that every reference in a bibliography exists or was retracted | alterlab-citation-verifier |
| Managing a Zotero library (items, collections, attachments) | alterlab-pyzotero |
| Writing a structured literature review from the papers found | alterlab-literature-review |
Quick Start
Basic Setup
OpenAlex runs on a daily cost budget (see "Rate Limits & Cost" below). It still answers with no credentials, but keyless calls share a $0.10/day budget with everyone on the same IP address — on university, VPN, or cloud networks that budget is often already spent, and every list or search call then returns HTTP 429 until midnight UTC. A free API key gives you your own $1/day — get one at openalex.org/settings/api and export it as OPENALEX_API_KEY; the client reads it and sends it as an Authorization: Bearer header, which keeps the key out of URLs and logs (?api_key= also works). The old mailto "polite pool" was retired in Feb 2026, so mailto= no longer buys anything.
What ships with it
5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 1mo ago Changed · -4 lines 78af68c67fcb
- 1mo ago First seen · 502 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 192d5f72443b
alterlab-openalex is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (78 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 4,250 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-05.
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