Science Skills is a collection of add-ons that give AI agents structured instructions, scripts, and references for scientific research, including genomics, structural biology, cheminformatics, and literature search. Researchers use it to guide agents through specialized scientific tasks with information from databases and tools such as AlphaGenome, AFDB, and UniProt. The catalogue entries are individual skills from this collection.
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 google-deepmind/science-skills --skill literature_search_openalexgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/google-deepmind/science-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/google-deepmind/science-skills/literature_search_openalex)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/literature_search_openalex"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/literature_search_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/google-deepmind/science-skills/literature_search_openalex"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/literature_search_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 | $0.00083 | $0.01886 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00042 | $0.00943 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00377 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00189 |
Grade A, and why
literature-search-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 12d 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.
3. **Use the CLI only.** Never call the API via `curl`/`urllib`. The CLI How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 170 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
OpenAlex Skill
Prerequisites
uv: Read theuvskill and follow its Setup instructions to ensureuvis installed and on PATH.- User Notification: If .licenses/literature_search_openalex_LICENSE.txt does not already exist in the workspace root directory then (1) prominently notify the user to check the terms at https://developers.openalex.org/ and to always check the license of the papers retrieved by the skill for any restrictions, then (2) create the file recording the notification text and timestamp.
.envfile: Make sure the.envfile exists in your home directory. Create one if it does not exist.OPENALEX_API_KEY(optional but recommended): Enables the OpenAlex Premium API with higher rate limits. The skill works without it (using the free "polite pool"). You can obtain a key at OpenAlex.org → account settings. You MUST use the safe credentials protocol in thecredentialsskill to check for and request this key if this skill looks relevant to the user's request.
Core Rules
- List Sources. If this skill is used, ensure this is mentioned in the output AND list the URLs of all papers that were used in producing the output.
- Resolve before filter. NEVER filter by name. Always
resolvea name to an ID first, then use that ID in--filter. - Use the CLI only. Never call the API via
curl/urllib. The CLI handles retries and rate limiting. - No fabrication. Never invent OpenAlex IDs or DOIs. Use
resolve/getto look them up. Report empty results accurately. - API key. If a command returns 401/429 or you need high-volume queries,
you MUST use the safe credentials protocol in the
credentialsskill to check for and request theOPENALEX_API_KEYto help the user add it to their.envfile. - Keep output small. Always use
--selectand--per-page 5–10for overview queries. Pipefilteroutput to a file (> results.json), then slim withjqbefore reading into context.
What ships with it
11 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.
- references/authors.md 3.6 KB
- references/citation.bib 299 B
- references/geo_and_language.md 1.9 KB
- references/institutions.md 2.7 KB
- references/publishers_funders.md 2.5 KB
- references/sources.md 3.8 KB
- references/taxonomy.md 2.8 KB
- references/topics.md 1.2 KB
- references/type_values.md 3.6 KB
- references/works.md 17 KB
- scripts/openalex_cli.py 20 KB runs code
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 170 lines · 83 tokens per session scan A 5f01889e2c75
literature-search-openalex is a skill published in the GitHub repository google-deepmind/science-skills (3,003 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 83 tokens to every session and 1,886 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 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 2026-08-30.
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