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OpenAlex has cached full-text content for about 60 million works:
FormatFilesSize
PDF~60M~250 TB
TEI XML~43M~20 TB
TEI XML files are machine-readable structured text parsed by Grobid.

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Download options

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Option 1: API (up to ~10K files)

Download files one at a time from the content API. Each download costs $0.01. 
https://content.openalex.org/works/{work_id}.pdf?api_key=YOUR_KEY
ExtensionFormat
.pdfPDF (default)
.grobid-xmlTEI XML
curl "https://content.openalex.org/works/W2741809807.pdf?api_key=YOUR_KEY"
Finding downloadable works: Use the has_content filter to find works with available content: 
# Works with PDFs from 2024
https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=has_content.pdf:true,publication_year:2024

# CC-BY works with PDFs
https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=has_content.pdf:true,best_oa_location.license:cc-by
You can also check the content_url field on any work object to see if content is available. With a free API key ($1/day), you can download about 100 files per day. Good for research projects, building small corpora, or sampling.

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Option 2: OpenAlex CLI (up to a few million files)

For larger downloads, use the OpenAlex CLI. It handles parallel downloads, retries, checkpointing, and resume automatically. 
pip install openalex-official
Download PDFs for a specific topic: 
openalex download \
  --api-key YOUR_KEY \
  --output ./climate-pdfs \
  --filter "topics.id:T10325,has_content.pdf:true" \
  --content pdf
Download works with Creative Commons licenses: 
openalex download \
  --api-key YOUR_KEY \
  --output ./cc-pdfs \
  --filter "best_oa_location.license:cc-by,has_content.pdf:true" \
  --content pdf
Download metadata + PDFs + TEI XML: 
openalex download \
  --api-key YOUR_KEY \
  --output ./my-corpus \
  --filter "topics.id:T10325,has_content.pdf:true" \
  --content pdf,xml
Standard rates apply ($0.01 per content file; metadata is free). At full speed, you can download a few million files in a few days.

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Option 3: Complete archive sync

For the complete archive (all 60M files), we provide direct access to the storage bucket via time-limited credentials. Files are stored on Cloudflare R2, which is fully S3-compatible. One-time download: 30-day R2 read access to sync the complete archive. Ongoing sync: Persistent R2 read access is included with the enterprise subscription. See the pricing page for details, or contact us to get started. How it works:
1

Get credentials

We generate R2 API credentials with read-only access.
2

Sync with AWS CLI

aws s3 sync s3://openalex-pdfs ./pdfs \
  --endpoint-url https://a452eddbbe06eb7d02f4879cee70d29c.r2.cloudflarestorage.com
3

Stay current

For ongoing sync, run periodically to get new files.
At typical network speeds, expect 1–2 weeks to download the full archive.

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File naming

Files are named by UUID, not work ID: 
openalex-pdfs/
├── 3a07228e-de2a-4c37-955d-b1411a498328.pdf
├── 7b12f4a1-8c9d-4e5f-a2b3-c4d5e6f7a8b9.pdf
└── ...

openalex-grobid-xml/
├── 3a07228e-de2a-4c37-955d-b1411a498328.xml.gz
├── 7b12f4a1-8c9d-4e5f-a2b3-c4d5e6f7a8b9.xml.gz
└── ...
To map work IDs to file UUIDs, use the snapshot data. The locations array in each work contains pdf_url fields that include the UUID.

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Licensing

The PDFs retain their original copyright. OpenAlex does not grant any additional rights to the content. To check the license for a specific work, use the best_oa_location.license field in the API: 
https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=has_content.pdf:true,best_oa_location.license:cc-by
This returns works that have downloadable PDFs and are licensed under CC BY.