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How to integrate OpenAlex MCP with Hermes

Connect Hermes to OpenAlex MCP. Find recent papers on causal inference, list top authors in linguistics field, and more using natural language, with authentication handled for you.

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OpenAlex is an open catalog of scholarly works, authors, institutions, sources, topics, and research metadata. Use it to discover research and enrich apps with structured academic metadata.

14 Tools

Introduction

Hermes is a 24/7 autonomous agent that lives on your computer or server — it remembers what it learns and evolves as your usage grows.

This guide explains the easiest and most robust way to connect your OpenAlex account to Hermes. You can do this through either Composio Connect CLI or Composio Connect MCP. For personal use we recommend the CLI, but you won't go wrong with MCP either.

Also integrate OpenAlex with

ChatGPTClaude CoworkAtomic Agent

What is Composio Connect?

Composio Connect is a consumer offering that lets anyone plug 1,500+ applications directly into their agent harness — including Hermes. It can:

  • Search and load tools from relevant toolkits on-demand, reducing context usage.
  • Chain multiple tools to accomplish complex workflows via a remote workbench, without excessive back-and-forth with the LLM.
  • Manage app authentication end-to-end with zero manual overhead.

Integrating OpenAlex with Hermes

Using Composio Connect CLI

1. Install the Composio CLI

Run the install script directly, or paste https://composio.dev/hermes into your Hermes chat box to have it installed for you.

bash
curl -fsSL https://composio.dev/install | bash
Hermes authenticating with Composio

2. Authenticate

Once the CLI is installed, ask Hermes to authenticate with Composio.

3. Connect to OpenAlex

Ask your agent to connect to OpenAlex, or simply request any OpenAlex-related task. Hermes will prompt you to authenticate and authorize access.

4. Done. You're all set with a new OpenAlex connection.

Using Composio Connect MCP

1. Get your MCP URL and API Key

Go to dashboard.composio.dev and copy your Connect MCP URL and API key.

Copy MCP URL and API key from Composio dashboard

2. Open the Hermes config file

bash
nano ~/.hermes/config.yaml

3. Add the Composio Connect MCP server

bash
mcp_servers:
  composio:
    url: "https://connect.composio.dev/mcp"
    headers:
      x-consumer-api-key: "YOUR_COMPOSIO_API_KEY"
    connect_timeout: 60
    timeout: 180

Save with Ctrl + O, Enter, then exit with Ctrl + X.

4. Restart your Hermes agent

Once restarted, ask your agent to connect to OpenAlex or request any OpenAlex-related task. It will prompt you to authenticate and authorize access.

5. Done!

What is the OpenAlex MCP server, and what's possible with it?

The OpenAlex MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to your OpenAlex account. It provides structured and secure access to scholarly works, authors, institutions, sources, topics, and related research metadata, so your agent can search research, retrieve metadata, manage private collections, download work content, and monitor catalog updates on your behalf.

  • Scholarly research discovery: Have your agent search, filter, sort, sample, or group scholarly works to find research that matches your criteria.
  • Research entity exploration: Let the agent find and retrieve details about authors, institutions, sources, topics, publishers, funders, awards, and geographic or language classifications.
  • Private research collections: Direct your agent to create, view, rename, describe, organize, or delete private collections and manage the research items they contain.
  • Full-text content retrieval: Instruct your agent to download available cached PDFs or structured full-text files for selected scholarly works.
  • Catalog and usage monitoring: Have your agent check available catalog updates, review changed record counts, validate your API key, and inspect usage budget, balance, reset timing, and query costs.

Way Forward

With OpenAlex connected, Hermes can now act on your behalf whenever it detects a relevant task or you ask it to.

From here, you can extend Hermes further:

  • Connect more apps: Calendar, Slack, Notion, Linear, and hundreds of others are available through the same Composio Connect setup. Each new integration compounds what Hermes can do for you.
  • Build workflows across tools: Once multiple apps are connected, Hermes can chain actions together — turn an email into a calendar invite, a Slack message into a Linear ticket, or a meeting note into a follow-up draft.
  • Let it learn your patterns: The more you use Hermes, the better it gets at anticipating how you'd handle recurring tasks. Give it feedback on drafts and decisions, and it will adapt.

If you run into trouble or want to share what you've built, join the community or check out the Docs for deeper configuration options.

TOOLS

Supported Tools

Every OpenAlex action and event your agent gets out of the box.

Add Collection Entities

Bulk-add one or more matching OpenAlex entity IDs to an owned collection without duplicating existing memberships.

Autocomplete Entities

Resolve a partial name or title to likely OpenAlex entity IDs before filtering or retrieving metadata.

Create Collection

Create a private, single-entity-type OpenAlex collection, optionally with an initial bounded set of entity IDs.

Delete Collection

Permanently delete exactly one owned private OpenAlex collection and all of its collection memberships.

Download Work Content

Download an OpenAlex-cached PDF or gzipped GROBID TEI file for a work.

Get Collection

Get metadata for one private OpenAlex collection owned by the connected user.

Get Metadata Entity

Retrieve one OpenAlex work, author, source, institution, topic, keyword, publisher, funder, award, taxonomy item, country, continent, or language by its supported identifier.

Get Rate Limit Status

Validate the connected OpenAlex API key and inspect daily budget, prepaid balance, reset timing, and current endpoint costs before expensive queries or downloads.

List Collection Entities

List one page of entity IDs in an owned private collection together with collection metadata and page totals.

List My Collections

List private OpenAlex collections owned by the connected API-key user, optionally finding collections that contain an entity.

Query Metadata Entities

Search, filter, sort, sample, select, or group one OpenAlex metadata resource other than works, including authors, venues, organizations, taxonomy, geography, awards, and enumerations.

Query Works

Search, filter, sort, sample, select, or group scholarly works.

Remove Collection Entities

Bulk-remove one or more entity memberships from an owned private OpenAlex collection without deleting the underlying OpenAlex entities.

Update Collection

Update a private collection's name or description, or change its entity type while the collection is empty.

FRAMEWORKS

How to build OpenAlex MCP Agent with another framework

ChatGPT logo

ChatGPT

Use OpenAlex MCP with ChatGPT

Claude Cowork logo

Claude Cowork

Use OpenAlex MCP with Claude Cowork

Atomic Agent logo

Atomic Agent

Use OpenAlex MCP with Atomic Agent

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

With a standalone OpenAlex MCP server, the agents and LLMs can only access a fixed set of OpenAlex tools tied to that server. However, with the Composio Tool Router, agents can dynamically load tools from OpenAlex and many other apps based on the task at hand, all through a single MCP endpoint.

Yes, you can. Hermes fully supports MCP integration. You get structured tool calling, message history handling, and model orchestration while Tool Router takes care of discovering and serving the right OpenAlex tools.

Yes, absolutely. You can configure which OpenAlex scopes and actions are allowed when connecting your account to Composio. You can also bring your own OAuth credentials or API configuration so you keep full control over what the agent can do.

All sensitive data such as tokens, keys, and configuration is fully encrypted at rest and in transit. Composio is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and follows strict security practices so your OpenAlex data and credentials are handled as safely as possible.

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