As we step into 2026, we reflect on the remarkable progress of the OpenAIRE Graph over the past year. Building on sustained growth in adoption, data integration, technical innovation, and community engagement, the Graph continues to advance its mission of enabling open, transparent, and FAIR research ecosystems.

Let's dive into what made 2025 extraordinary!

Sustainable path

• The European Commission employs the Graph as the authoritative source of information for the resource catalogue of the EOSC EU Node, consolidating its role in the EOSC Federation through support for onboarding research product catalogues;
• National and institutional adoption of the Graph has expanded significantly, with 13 funders, 26 research initiatives, and 70 research institutions now relying on it for monitoring research production. Notable examples include university alliances like the Aurora Network, global institutions such as the World Bank, and national initiatives including the Netherlands Research Portal and National Open Access Monitor Ireland. The University of Milan joined the growing OpenAIRE MONITOR community, using Graph data to track research outputs, Open Access trends, and impact indicators;
• In Greece, OpenAIRE was awarded the development of a national infrastructure for mapping the country's research activity, operating under the auspices of HEAL-Link. This initiative uses the Graph to provide comprehensive view of the research performance of Greek academic institutions, supporting national monitoring and strategic planning for Open Science advancement.
• The Graph continues to drive scholarly communication innovation on FAIRness, interoperability, and Open Science indicators through European projects including EOSC Beyond, EOSC Track, SciLake, GraspOS, PathOS, EVERSE, OSTrails, and CRAFT-OA.

Data spotlight

In 2025, 108 new data sources were registered by providers, reaching the impressive record of 2064 endpoints directly aggregated data/software repositories, thematic/institutional aggregators, and institutional/thematic/catch-all repositories.

Research product records (after deduplication) reached ~212Mi publications, 93Mi datasets, ~803K software (~including ~548K inferred through mining prior to deduplication), plus 33Mi other kinds of products;

ScholeXplorer, the Graph's citation index reached ~2.3Bi publication-to-publication bi-lateral links (61.7Mi inferred by mining and visible in the Graph after deduplication), ~151Mi publication-dataset links (214K inferred by mining), ~1.2Mi publication-software links (17.6K inferred by mining).

Access to the Graph

The Graph, which is available through APIs and data dumps in Zenodo.org, recorded an outstanding increase in users!

• The APIs counted ~100Mi requests per month
• The OpenAIRE EXPLORE UI counted ~550K unique visitors per month
• Including last year’s statistics, the Graph datasets have been viewed ~70,000 times and downloaded ~90,000 times from the dedicated collection in Zenodo.org.

Innovation spotlight

What’s new to the Graph?

• The new releases of the Graph API allows users to access OpenAIRE Graph data through modern JSON APIs. This release brings substantial improvements in usability, efficiency, and data integration capabilities, empowering researchers and institutions to perform advanced research monitoring, discovery, and bibliometric analyses with greater ease and flexibility. To ensure a smooth transition, the Search API remain available allowing users time to adjust and migrate at their own pace. However, the Search API will be deprecated so we urge all users to migrate as soon as possible!
• Release of ScholeXplorer API 3.0, the first global endpoint to deliver a comprehensive citation index spanning publications, research data, and software, encompassing 3.6 billion bilateral citation relationships across more than 400 million unique identifiers. This release fundamentally transforms how we understand research impact by bridging the traditional gap between scientific literature, datasets, and software, enabling a more comprehensive approach to research impact and scholarly assessment.
• The introduction of "Persons" as a dedicated entity in the OpenAIRE Graph marks a significant advancement in how we connect scholars to their research, affiliations, collaborations, and projects. The Graph bases person entities on authoritative identifiers, currently starting with ORCID, with plans to incorporate additional identifiers from national and institutional person registries in the near future.

Community engagement

• To support adoption of the new Graph API, two dedicated training sessions were held online: one open to the public and one for OpenAIRE members, engaging 40 participants in total.
• 10 Community Calls were held throughout the year, welcoming more than 150 participants, where our team and invited speakers went behind the scenes and presented Graph functionalities, new developments, and use cases;
• The User Forum welcomed 41 new users in 2025, reaching a total of 100 users who generated 55 new posts across 27 discussions.
• 7800 publications have cited or referred to the OpenAIRE Graph.