Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oksure/openalex-research-mcpnpx agentmods add skills/oksure/openalex-research-mcp/skillWrote 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/oksure/openalex-research-mcp/skill)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oksure/openalex-research-mcp/skill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oksure/openalex-research-mcp/skill.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00100 | $0.01288 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00050 | $0.00644 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00020 | $0.00258 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00129 |
Grade A, and why
openalex scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Makes network callslowCapability
Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.
description: "Search academic papers, authors, institutions, and topics via the OpenAlex API (477M+ works). Direct CLI/curl calls, zero token cost when not in use. 논문 검색, 저자 찾기, 인용 확인, 학술 검색, 피인용 수, 학회지 검색, 연구자 찾기, 논문 피인 How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 119 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Status: active
/openalex -- Academic Paper & Research Search
OpenAlex is a free, open catalog of the global research system (477M+ works, 90M+ authors).
This skill is the lightweight, token-frugal counterpart to the
openalex-research-mcpMCP server in this repo: instead of a persistent server with 31 structured tools, it shells out to a small CLI on demand, so it costs nothing while idle. Use the MCP server inside MCP clients (Claude Desktop, TypingMind); use this skill inside coding agents with shell access.
When NOT to use
- arXiv/SSRN full-text search -> OpenAlex has metadata only, not full text
- Reading a specific paper's full text -> fetch the DOI URL directly
- Getting BibTeX citations -> use CrossRef (
https://api.crossref.org/works/<DOI>)
Setup
The skill drives the openalex CLI bundled at skill/bin/openalex (zero
dependencies, Python 3). Put it on your PATH:
chmod +x skill/bin/openalex
export PATH="$PWD/skill/bin:$PATH"
# Optional but recommended (faster "polite pool"):
export OPENALEX_EMAIL="[email protected]"
# Optional (premium): export OPENALEX_API_KEY="..."
Both env vars are optional — OpenAlex serves anonymous requests for free.
Core Patterns — openalex CLI
The CLI handles key/email injection, mandatory select= field trimming (full
responses are 3x larger), abstract reconstruction from the inverted index, and
DOI→W-id resolution. Add --json for shaped JSON output.
Search works (papers)
openalex works "supply chain network" -n 10
openalex works "structural estimation" --filter "from_publication_date:2024-01-01,cited_by_count:>10"
openalex works "<query>" --abstract # include reconstructed abstracts
Get a specific work
openalex work 10.3982/ecta7743 # by DOI
openalex work W2070854196 --abstract --refs
Authors (two-step: search name → use the A-id; names are ambiguous, IDs are not)
openalex authors "daron acemoglu" -n 3
openalex author-works A5012301204 -n 10 # top works by citation
openalex experts "CRISPR gene editing" -n 5 # leading authors ON a topic, by h-index
experts resolves the topic to a topics.id and ranks authors who work on it by
h-index (unlike authors, which name-matches) — use it to find field leaders.
What ships with it
4 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.
- 8d ago First seen · 119 lines · 100 tokens per session scan A 996c546a1983
openalex is a skill published in the GitHub repository oksure/openalex-research-mcp (50 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 100 tokens to every session and 1,288 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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