Current Affairs

OpenAIRE and Alien Intelligence Announce Partnership to Bring AI Agents to the OpenAIRE Graph

May 20, 2026

…AI is changing how research is discovered and used. A newer generation of systems, often called agentic AI, can reason across sources, plan tasks, follow relationships between entities, and support decisions based on structured evidence. For open scholarly infrastructures, this raises a clear question: can the systems that increasingly interpret scientific knowledge be grounded in open, transparent, community-governed sources rather than in opaque content of unknown origin?

To work on this,OpenAIRE has partnered with Alien Intelligence (Alien AI), a startup building agentic AI systems that interact with structured knowledge environments.

The collaboration combines two things. OpenAIRE brings the OpenAIRE Graph, a community-governed scholarly infrastructure with more than 350 million research products linked to researchers, organisations, funders, projects, datasets, software, and publications. Alien Intelligence brings the agent layer that can navigate these connections and turn them into usable answers.

The result is a direct connection between autonomous AI agents and the OpenAIRE Graph. Instead of relying on general web content or text prediction alone, agents can work with authoritative scholarly metadata, persistent identifiers, and verified relationships between research entities. Every answer can be traced back to its source in the Graph.

Paolo Manghi, OpenAIRE CTO, and Ghislain Delabie of Alien Intelligence describe the work as a commitment to trustworthy AI, addressing the two persistent issues in AI-driven research:

Transparency. Each result carries a clear record of where in the Graph it came from.

Quality. The Graph is rebuilt regularly, with deduplication and validation of ORCID and ROR identifiers, so the agents are not working from noisy or unverified data.