A survey of 219 top-ranked universities (QS 2025) uncovered 634 APIs across 40 countries, but 84% of them are OAI-PMH institutional repository endpoints — metadata harvesting plumbing bundled with platforms like DSpace, EPrints, and Figshare. Only 16% of schools run anything resembling a modern developer program with portals, OAuth, or open-data APIs. Standouts include UCL (student-built OAuth portal), University of Pennsylvania (SDKs in Python and Node), and UC Berkeley (API Central gateway). Notable outliers include Caltech's astronomy Virtual Observatory APIs, Shanghai Jiao Tong's GraphQL endpoint, and ETH Zurich's library-as-data-platform approach. The core finding: universities have enormous structured open research data but almost no developer-facing front door to it.
Table of contents
Where the universities areWhat a “university API” actually isThe schools doing the mostThe interesting cornersWhat this tells me42.6K Impressions1 Comment