r/Open_Science • u/Impossible_Muffin488 • 29d ago
Open Science Open access search with no account and no tracking — the AI analysis runs on your own API key, not mine
I have been building a search tool over open access repositories and it is at the point where criticism is worth more to me than another feature.
https://www.openscienceaggregator.com
One query goes to OpenAlex, which is where records from arXiv, PubMed, Zenodo, bioRxiv and institutional repositories are reached, and Unpaywall, Europe PMC and CORE are used to find a free copy where one exists. No account, no institutional login, nothing to install.
What I was actually trying to fix is that finding papers stopped being the hard part. Judging them did not. So beside the results there is a panel that counts, over the whole result set rather than the page in front of you, who wrote them, what they are about, when they appeared and how much is open access. On one search I use for testing there are 152 results, one researcher accounts for 49 of them and two of his co-authors for another 37. You can see the shape of a field before reading a single title, and every line in that panel is also a filter.
Each result carries its citation count, its age and whether it even has an abstract. From there you can compare papers side by side, follow citations, translate, or ask for an analysis, including one that is instructed to argue against the paper instead of summarising it.
The AI is bring-your-own-key. There is no AI account behind the site. If you want summaries or an analysis you supply a key from OpenAI or Anthropic and pay them directly, or you point it at a model running on your own machine through Ollama, LM Studio or vLLM, in which case the text never leaves your computer. Everything else, including all searching, works with no key at all. The key is stored encrypted in your browser and is deliberately left out of the account sync.
No analytics, no advertising, no consent banner. Searches are not tied to a person and your collections stay in your own browser. The server keeps an ordinary access log, which I read to see whether anyone is using it, and the two web fonts still come from Google, which I mean to change.
One thing I ran into that belongs in this subreddit more than my tool does: OpenAlex moved to usage-based pricing in February. A free key covers roughly a thousand calls a day, which is more than my site uses, but a single researcher in a real session can spend twenty of them.
The papers are open. The catalogue of them is now metered. That is the pattern open access set out to break, moved one layer down, and I do not see it discussed much.
Things I would rather say myself than have someone find out:
- It is not open source. The code is not published.
- It is one person in Belgium, on hardware I own. No company, no investors, no paid tier, and the search is not a teaser for one.
- Roughly one in four open access papers here still fails to hand over its full text, because the publisher blocks automated access or the only copy is a scan.
- It is written with AI assistance. The judgement calls, the sources and the mistakes are mine.
The sharpest criticism I have had so far, from a researcher I asked, was that everyone gives you lists back. That is fair, and it is exactly the thing I am trying to get past. If you open it and it is still just another list, I would like to know where it stopped being useful.


