Academic Research is an OpenClaw community skill that wraps OpenAlex lookups into agent-friendly research tasks: topic search, author search, DOI lookup, citation-chain exploration, open-access URL discovery, and a lightweight literature-review workflow. The source evidence says it uses OpenAlex without an API key and includes Python scripts for search and review generation.
Use this as a candidate for researchers, students, content teams, and agent builders who need fast paper triage before a deeper manual review. It is especially useful when the job is discovery and metadata synthesis rather than guaranteed full-text extraction or peer-reviewed conclusions.
The visible setup surface is small: a SKILL.md plus Python scripts that call public scholarly APIs. Source files reviewed from ClawHub show network calls to OpenAlex and Unpaywall, a /tmp cache for literature-review results, and optional markdown/JSON output. Pricing is classified as free because the ClawHub/source text states OpenAlex usage needs no API key and the page lists an MIT-0 license; no paid gate was visible in the fetched evidence.
Before anyone installs or uses it, Runner AI Review should produce artifacts for: static scan of SKILL.md and all bundled scripts; dependency/install review, including Python package imports and whether requests is assumed or bundled; prompt-injection and tool-poisoning review of the skill text and generated outputs; sandbox execution against harmless OpenAlex queries with network egress restricted to expected domains; screenshot or video capture of representative command output; and a residual-risk note covering API data quality, cached files in /tmp, outbound scholarly API calls, and citation-synthesis hallucination risk.
This has not been tested, verified safe, or marked production-ready by LinkLoot Runner artifacts yet. The main visible risks are outbound network access, third-party scholarly data reliability, local cache writes under /tmp, and the temptation to treat generated literature reviews as authoritative. The skill should be reviewed as untrusted code and run only in a sandbox until Runner evidence exists.
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