About OpenPharos
What is OpenPharos?
OpenPharos is a research paper alert service that finds new papers matching your interests and delivers them translated into your language.
Every day, thousands of papers are published across every discipline. Most are written in English. If English isn't your first language, keeping up means spending hours searching, reading titles you half-understand, and manually translating abstracts. OpenPharos eliminates that friction.
You tell us what you're interested in. Our AI builds precise search queries from your input. We scan 480 million+ works indexed by OpenAlex, and deliver new papers to your inbox — with titles and summaries translated into the language you think in.
How it works
- Describe your research interests in any language.
- Our AI generates search queries and finds matching papers daily.
- You receive an email digest with translated titles. Open-access (CC-BY) papers include AI-generated summaries in your language.
Who we are
OpenPharos is built and operated by Altevia, a sole proprietorship based in Japan. We are not a nonprofit, a university, or a venture-backed startup. We are an independent, self-funded business.
OpenPharos was created by a materials science researcher who experienced firsthand the challenge of staying current with global literature while working in a non-English-speaking environment. The idea is simple: if the world's research is open, the tools to access it should meet researchers where they are — in their own language.
Our relationship with OpenAlex
OpenPharos is powered by data from OpenAlex, a free and open catalog of the global research system maintained by the nonprofit OurResearch. OpenAlex provides metadata for 480 million+ scholarly works under the CC0 (public domain) license.
We have received explicit written permission from OurResearch to use OpenAlex data commercially for this service.
OpenPharos is an independent project. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with OpenAlex or OurResearch. We are grateful for their work in making scholarly data open and accessible to everyone.
The name "OpenPharos" is a tribute to the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria — the ancient lighthouse that stood alongside the Library of Alexandria, which inspired OpenAlex's name. The Library gathered knowledge; the Lighthouse guided it to those who needed it. That's what we aim to do.
What we believe
Research belongs to everyone. Language should not be a barrier to knowledge. The tools researchers need should be affordable, transparent, and respectful of open-access principles.
We only summarize papers that are published under open licenses (CC-BY). For all other papers, we provide metadata and links to the original source. We do not host, redistribute, or reproduce copyrighted content.
Contact
For questions, feedback, or partnership inquiries:
[email protected]
Citation
OpenPharos uses data from OpenAlex. If you use OpenAlex data in research, please cite:
Priem, J., Piwowar, H., & Orr, R. (2022). OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts. ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01833