# California Institute of Technology **Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/caltech/ **Website:** https://www.caltech.edu/ **APIs profiled:** 11 The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, and one of the rare institutions in this cohort whose machine-readable footprint is genuinely its own rather than a vendor's contract running under its name. Caltech operates no central developer portal — neither api.caltech.edu nor developer.caltech.edu resolves — and publishes no OpenAPI, no llms.txt, no .well-known catalog and no status page. What it does operate is real research infrastructure on its own domain, engineered by four independent units with no shared convention between them: Caltech Library runs CaltechDATA and CaltechAUTHORS on self-hosted InvenioRDM, with public REST APIs, OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoints and DataCite DOIs minted under Caltech's own 10.22002 prefix; the Seismological Laboratory runs the Southern California Earthquake Data Center's FDSN web services; Caltech/IPAC runs three NASA archives — IRSA, NED and the NASA Exoplanet Archive — behind IVOA Virtual Observatory interfaces; and IMSS runs a Shibboleth identity provider registered in the InCommon federation. Five of the twelve education-regime domain standards are evidenced directly inside live Caltech contracts: shibboleth, saml, oai-pmh, datacite and orcid. The library discovery layer is the one genuinely outsourced surface, a Springshare tenancy at libguides.caltech.edu. The honest summary is that Caltech ships excellent open research data and almost no API product management around it. ## Kin Score — 29.6 / 100 (thin) Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: rising (+11.2 from 18.4). | Facet | Score | |---|---| | Discoverability | 64.8 | | Contract Quality | 23.3 | | Governance | 3.8 | | Contract Governance | 3.8 | | Operational Transparency | 26.3 | | Developer Ergonomics | 19.0 | | Commercial Clarity | 39.5 | | Access Clarity | 39.5 | Regulatory layer — **Education & Research**: 38.9 (matched via tags). ## Agent readiness — 29.9 (agent-aware) | Dimension | Value | |---|---| | Spec Presence | yes | | Agentic Access | no | | Reversibility Documented | no | | MCP Server | no | | Auth Clarity | yes | | Idempotency | no | | Error Semantics | no | | OpenAPI Examples | partial | | Rate Limit Signal | documented | | Event Surface Described | no | | Agent Skills | no | | Well Known Catalog | no | | Consent Identity | no | | Agent Card | no | | Dry Run Mode | no | ## Access Free — onboarding: unknown, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: high). ## APIs (11) - **CaltechDATA REST API** — Public REST API for CaltechDATA, the Caltech institutional research data repository. Returns published records with DataCite 4 metadata, files, version chains and DOIs. Verified... - **CaltechDATA OAI-PMH** — OAI-PMH 2.0 metadata harvesting endpoint for CaltechDATA. Verified live 2026-08-19 via the Identify verb (repositoryName CaltechDATA, protocolVersion 2.0) and via ListMetadataFo... - **CaltechAUTHORS REST API and OAI-PMH** — Caltech's institutional publications repository, also on self-hosted InvenioRDM. Exposes the same REST record API and an OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint, carrying ORCID and ROR identifiers... - **Caltech Library Feeds** — A metadata service built and operated by Caltech Library (v1.6), harvesting its institutional repositories, public directory and archival systems into static JSON datasets publi... - **SCEDC FDSN Web Services** — The Southern California Earthquake Data Center, operated by the Caltech Seismological Laboratory, exposes FDSN-standard seismic web services — fdsnws-event, fdsnws-station and f... - **IRSA Virtual Observatory APIs (Caltech/IPAC)** — The NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive exposes IVOA-standard Virtual Observatory interfaces — Table Access Protocol (TAP/ADQL), Simple Cone Search and Simple Image Access v2 — o... - **NED Table Access Protocol (Caltech/IPAC)** — The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, operated by Caltech/IPAC, exposes an IVOA TAP service over its extragalactic object catalog. Verified live 2026-08-19 returning TAP_SCHEMA ... - **NASA Exoplanet Archive TAP (Caltech/IPAC)** — The NASA Exoplanet Archive, operated by Caltech/IPAC, exposes an IVOA TAP service over its confirmed-planet and related tables. Verified live 2026-08-19 returning real planet na... - **Caltech Shibboleth Identity Provider (InCommon)** — Caltech operates its own Shibboleth identity provider at idp.caltech.edu, asserting scoped attributes for caltech.edu. The SAML 2.0 metadata is machine-readable and publicly ret... - **Caltech Library Guides (Springshare tenancy)** — Caltech Library's discovery and research-guide layer runs on Springshare LibGuides/LibApps rather than on institution-operated software. Recorded as a real institutional relatio... - **EBSCO Link Resolver (Caltech instance)** — Caltech Library's OpenURL link resolver is an EBSCO tenancy — instance `l7ubco` on the shared host resolver.ebsco.com — referenced from Caltech's own library pages. Recorded as ... ## Security (2) - **Caltech Authentication** — 0 schemes - **Caltech Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC ## Plans (1) - **Caltech Plans Pricing** ## Tags University, Higher Education, Education, Private Research University, Institute of Technology, United States, California, Research Data, Open Data, Research Repository, Identity Federation, Astronomy, Seismology, Research Computing, OAI-PMH --- Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/caltech/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.