Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) is a public, land-grant research university with its primary campus at University Park, PA, and is ranked #69 in the QS World University Rankings 2025. Its programmable footprint is real but narrow, and it lives almost entirely in University Libraries rather than in central IT. Penn State publishes two genuine first-party OpenAPI descriptions of services it builds and operates itself: the Researcher Metadata Database (RMD), the authority on faculty and research metadata, and ScholarSphere, its self-built institutional repository — both key-gated, both described in OpenAPI 3.0 by the Libraries team that wrote them. Alongside those it runs an open OAI-PMH 2.0 provider over the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive, an unauthenticated facilities API from the Office of Physical Plant (LionSpaceFIS), and its own Shibboleth identity provider registered in InCommon. Penn State also authors open-source identity software, including a SCIM 2.0 server implementation. What it no longer has is a central developer portal: docs.developer.psu.edu, which catalogued internal REST services such as PSU ID, Academic Course and Cornerstone behind WebAccess single sign-on, now redirects to sites.psu.edu and has been decommissioned. There is no unified API gateway, no shared credential, and no self-service onboarding — each surface issues its own key out of the unit that operates it.
Pennsylvania State University publishes 7 APIs on the APIs.io network, including Researcher Metadata Database (RMD) API, ScholarSphere API, Buildings API, and 4 more. Tagged areas include Education, Higher Education, University, Public Research University, and Land Grant.
The Pennsylvania State University catalog on APIs.io includes 1 JSON-LD context and 2 Spectral governance rulesets.
Pennsylvania State University’s developer surface includes API reference, documentation, authentication, and 23 more developer resources.
Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the
Education & Research regime, so
Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite.
If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your
provider repo — the
applicability map is public and we will correct it.
Create-or-Update Ergonomics applies to this provider. This API accepts writes, so it
carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from the published contracts
themselves: whether a caller can create-or-update in one call, whether the write accepts a key the caller already
holds, and whether the response says which branch ran. Without that, every write needs a search-and-branch in
front of it, and the first time that check is skipped a duplicate record is created.
Scored against the observed mean rather than raw — a provider at the catalog average is unchanged by this facet,
not penalised by it.
The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them,
because the conditional facet above carries the other
25. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped
maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal
weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.
Penn State University Libraries' faculty and research metadata service, built and run in-house with OSVPR and West Arete. Publishes cleaned researcher metadata — publications, g...
Penn State's next-generation institutional repository, written by Penn State University Libraries and released under MIT — not a Figshare, Dataverse or DSpace tenancy. The API i...
An open OAI-PMH 2.0 harvesting endpoint over Penn State's Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive, served by the Libraries' own etda_explore application on a psu.edu host. I...
Penn State operates its own Shibboleth identity provider and registers it in the InCommon federation under entityID urn:mace:incommon:psu.edu. Penn State SERVES ITS OWN SAML met...
University buildings and their facility attributes. One tag of the Office of Physical Plant's single LionSpaceFIS service; the buildings, campuses, rooms, events and health entr...
Service health and status for the LionSpaceFIS facilities service; returns appVersion and appStatus with a database connectivity check. Unauthenticated and live (appVersion 1.14...
aid: pennsylvania-state-university
name: Pennsylvania State University
x-type: university
x-category: Public Research University
description: 'Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) is a public, land-grant research university with its primary campus
at University Park, PA, and is ranked #69 in the QS World University Rankings 2025. Its programmable footprint is real but
narrow, and it lives almost entirely in University Libraries rather than in central IT. Penn State publishes two genuine
first-party OpenAPI descriptions of services it builds and operates itself: the Researcher Metadata Database (RMD), the
authority on faculty and research metadata, and ScholarSphere, its self-built institutional repository — both key-gated,
both described in OpenAPI 3.0 by the Libraries team that wrote them. Alongside those it runs an open OAI-PMH 2.0 provider
over the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive, an unauthenticated facilities API from the Office of Physical Plant
(LionSpaceFIS), and its own Shibboleth identity provider registered in InCommon. Penn State also authors open-source identity
software, including a SCIM 2.0 server implementation. What it no longer has is a central developer portal: docs.developer.psu.edu,
which catalogued internal REST services such as PSU ID, Academic Course and Cornerstone behind WebAccess single sign-on,
now redirects to sites.psu.edu and has been decommissioned. There is no unified API gateway, no shared credential, and no
self-service onboarding — each surface issues its own key out of the unit that operates it.'
type: Index
deliveryModel:
model: saas
open_source: false
commercial: false
callable_host: true
label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
confidence: high
source:
- openapi
- probe
generated: '2026-08-30'
method: probed
accessModel:
pricing: free
onboarding: request
trial: false
try_now: false
public: false
label: Free · key issued on request by the operating unit
confidence: high
source:
- openapi
- authentication
generated: '2026-08-30'
method: probed
position: Consuming
access: 3rd-Party
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/pennsylvania-state-university.png
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/pennsylvania-state-university/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
tags:
- Education
- Higher Education
- University
- Public Research University
- Land Grant
- Big Ten
- Research
- Research Data
- Research Repository
- Open Access
- Identity Federation
- Library
- Facilities
- United States
created: '2026-06-03'
modified: '2026-08-30'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis:
- aid: pennsylvania-state-university:rmd
name: Researcher Metadata Database (RMD) API
x-operator: institution
description: Penn State University Libraries' faculty and research metadata service, built and run in-house with OSVPR and
West Arete. Publishes cleaned researcher metadata — publications, grants, presentations, performances, ETDs, advising,
news and biographical content — through a REST API described by a first-party OpenAPI 3.0.1 document with 14 paths across
user, publication and organization resources. ORCID identifiers are required fields on the profile response, not optional
decoration. A license key (X-API-Key) is issued by the Libraries on request; the unauthenticated response is a 401 JSON
envelope.
humanURL: https://metadata.libraries.psu.edu/api_docs
baseURL: https://metadata.libraries.psu.edu
tags:
- Research
- Metadata
- Publications
- Library
- ORCID
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/pennsylvania-state-university-researcher-metadata-api-openapi.yml
- type: OpenAPI
url: https://metadata.libraries.psu.edu/api-docs/v1/swagger.yaml
- type: Documentation
url: https://metadata.libraries.psu.edu/api_docs
- type: Signup
url: https://metadata.libraries.psu.edu/
- type: GitHub
url: https://github.com/psu-libraries/researcher-metadata
- type: Authentication
url: authentication/pennsylvania-state-university-authentication.yml
- type: x-examples
url: examples/pennsylvania-state-university-rmd-unauthenticated-example.json
- type: Errors
url: errors/pennsylvania-state-university-problem-types.yml
- aid: pennsylvania-state-university:scholarsphere
name: ScholarSphere API
x-operator: institution
description: Penn State's next-generation institutional repository, written by Penn State University Libraries and released
under MIT — not a Figshare, Dataverse or DSpace tenancy. The API is described by the Libraries' own OpenAPI 3.0.2 document
with servers set to https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/api/{version}, covering ingest, collections, file upload, featured resources
and a public DOI index. Penn State mints its own DataCite DOIs against the service under prefix 10.26207 as repository
client psu.scholar. Access is by X_API_KEY header issued by the ScholarSphere team.
humanURL: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/
baseURL: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/api/v1
tags:
- Research Data
- Research Repository
- Open Access
- DOI
- DataCite
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/pennsylvania-state-university-scholarsphere-api-openapi.yml
- type: OpenAPI
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/psu-libraries/scholarsphere/main/openapi.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://docs.scholarsphere.psu.edu/
- type: TermsOfService
url: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/about
- type: GitHub
url: https://github.com/psu-libraries/scholarsphere
- type: SDK
url: https://github.com/psu-libraries/scholarsphere-client
- type: Authentication
url: authentication/pennsylvania-state-university-authentication.yml
- type: x-examples
url: examples/pennsylvania-state-university-scholarsphere-unauthenticated-example.json
- type: Errors
url: errors/pennsylvania-state-university-problem-types.yml
- aid: pennsylvania-state-university:etda-oai-pmh
name: ETDA OAI-PMH Provider
x-operator: institution
description: An open OAI-PMH 2.0 harvesting endpoint over Penn State's Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive, served
by the Libraries' own etda_explore application on a psu.edu host. Identify reports repositoryName Penn_State_University,
adminEmail askalibrarian@psu.edu and an earliest datestamp of 1999-04-07; oai_dc is the supported metadata format and
the repository declares no set hierarchy. No credential, no registration — the one Penn State surface an outside machine
can harvest today without asking anyone.
humanURL: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/
baseURL: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/oai
tags:
- OAI-PMH
- Theses
- Research
- Library
- Open Access
properties:
- type: Documentation
url: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/
- type: x-examples
url: examples/pennsylvania-state-university-etda-oai-identify-example.xml
- type: GitHub
url: https://github.com/psu-libraries/etda_explore
- type: Conformance
url: conformance/pennsylvania-state-university-conformance.yml
- aid: pennsylvania-state-university:identity-federation
name: Penn State Identity Federation (InCommon / Shibboleth)
x-operator: institution
description: Penn State operates its own Shibboleth identity provider and registers it in the InCommon federation under
entityID urn:mace:incommon:psu.edu. Penn State SERVES ITS OWN SAML metadata at https://as1.fim.psu.edu/idp/shibboleth
(200 application/xml, 9,398 bytes) — IDPSSODescriptor plus SPSSODescriptor, shibmd:Scope psu.edu, OrganizationName "The
Pennsylvania State University", speaking Shibboleth 1.0, SAML 1.1 and SAML 2.0 over HTTP-Redirect, POST and SOAP ECP.
InCommon republishes that same document at mdq.incommon.org; the republication is the federation's, the IdP is Penn State's.
This is the machine-readable surface behind every WebAccess-gated Penn State service, and it is the reason most of the
institution's REST estate is unreadable from outside.
humanURL: https://as1.fim.psu.edu/idp/shibboleth
baseURL: https://as1.fim.psu.edu/idp
tags:
- Identity Federation
- Shibboleth
- SAML
- InCommon
- Single Sign-On
properties:
- type: x-metadata
url: https://as1.fim.psu.edu/idp/shibboleth
- type: x-federation-registration
url: https://mdq.incommon.org/entities/urn%3Amace%3Aincommon%3Apsu.edu
- type: Authentication
url: authentication/pennsylvania-state-university-authentication.yml
- type: Conformance
url: conformance/pennsylvania-state-university-conformance.yml
- aid: pennsylvania-state-university:pennsylvania-state-university-buildings-api
name: Pennsylvania State University Buildings API
x-operator: institution
description: University buildings and their facility attributes. One tag of the Office of Physical Plant's single LionSpaceFIS
service; the buildings, campuses, rooms, events and health entries in this file are five views of one contract, split
per tag by refine-openapis.
humanURL: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/
baseURL: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/v1
tags:
- Buildings
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/pennsylvania-state-university-buildings-api-openapi.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/pennsylvania-state-university-building-schema.json
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/pennsylvania-state-university-room-schema.json
- type: x-json-structure
url: json-structure/pennsylvania-state-university-building-structure.json
- type: x-json-structure
url: json-structure/pennsylvania-state-university-room-structure.json
- type: x-examples
url: examples/pennsylvania-state-university-listBuildings-example.json
- type: x-rules
url: rules/pennsylvania-state-university-rules.yml
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/pennsylvania-state-university-vocabulary.yml
- type: x-json-ld
url: json-ld/pennsylvania-state-university-context.jsonld
- aid: pennsylvania-state-university:pennsylvania-state-university-campuses-api
name: Pennsylvania State University Campuses API
x-operator: institution
description: Penn State campus reference data, from the Office of Physical Plant LionSpaceFIS service.
humanURL: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/
baseURL: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/v1
tags:
- Campuses
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/pennsylvania-state-university-campuses-api-openapi.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/pennsylvania-state-university-building-schema.json
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/pennsylvania-state-university-room-schema.json
- type: x-json-structure
url: json-structure/pennsylvania-state-university-building-structure.json
- type: x-json-structure
url: json-structure/pennsylvania-state-university-room-structure.json
- type: x-examples
url: examples/pennsylvania-state-university-listCampuses-example.json
- type: x-rules
url: rules/pennsylvania-state-university-rules.yml
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/pennsylvania-state-university-vocabulary.yml
- type: x-json-ld
url: json-ld/pennsylvania-state-university-context.jsonld
- aid: pennsylvania-state-university:pennsylvania-state-university-events-api
name: Pennsylvania State University Events API
x-operator: institution
description: Change events for buildings and rooms, from the Office of Physical Plant LionSpaceFIS service.
humanURL: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/
baseURL: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/v1
tags:
- Event
tags_raw:
- Events
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/pennsylvania-state-university-events-api-openapi.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/pennsylvania-state-university-building-schema.json
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/pennsylvania-state-university-room-schema.json
- type: x-json-structure
url: json-structure/pennsylvania-state-university-building-structure.json
- type: x-json-structure
url: json-structure/pennsylvania-state-university-room-structure.json
- type: x-examples
url: examples/pennsylvania-state-university-listBuildings-example.json
- type: x-rules
url: rules/pennsylvania-state-university-rules.yml
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/pennsylvania-state-university-vocabulary.yml
- type: x-json-ld
url: json-ld/pennsylvania-state-university-context.jsonld
- aid: pennsylvania-state-university:pennsylvania-state-university-health-api
name: Pennsylvania State University Health API
x-operator: institution
description: Service health and status for the LionSpaceFIS facilities service; returns appVersion and appStatus with a
database connectivity check. Unauthenticated and live (appVersion 1.14.0, probed 2026-08-30).
humanURL: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/
baseURL: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/v1
tags:
- Health
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/pennsylvania-state-university-health-api-openapi.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/
- type: x-examples
url: examples/pennsylvania-state-university-getHealth-example.json
- type: x-rules
url: rules/pennsylvania-state-university-rules.yml
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/pennsylvania-state-university-vocabulary.yml
- type: x-json-ld
url: json-ld/pennsylvania-state-university-context.jsonld
- aid: pennsylvania-state-university:pennsylvania-state-university-rooms-api
name: Pennsylvania State University Rooms API
x-operator: institution
description: Rooms within buildings, from the Office of Physical Plant LionSpaceFIS service.
humanURL: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/
baseURL: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/v1
tags:
- Rooms
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/pennsylvania-state-university-rooms-api-openapi.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/pennsylvania-state-university-room-schema.json
- type: x-json-structure
url: json-structure/pennsylvania-state-university-room-structure.json
- type: x-examples
url: examples/pennsylvania-state-university-listRooms-example.json
- type: x-rules
url: rules/pennsylvania-state-university-rules.yml
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/pennsylvania-state-university-vocabulary.yml
- type: x-json-ld
url: json-ld/pennsylvania-state-university-context.jsonld
x-coverage:
state: covered
reason: covered
detail: 'Penn State operates five machine-readable surfaces of its own and we hold contracts or probed evidence for all
five. Two carry genuine first-party OpenAPI documents the university wrote itself (Researcher Metadata Database, ScholarSphere);
one is an open OAI-PMH 2.0 provider over the ETD archive; one is an unauthenticated facilities API from the Office of
Physical Plant whose description in this repo is ours, reconstructed from HTML docs and live responses; one is the university''s
own Shibboleth IdP published as SAML metadata in InCommon. No vendor contract is attributed to Penn State in this repo
and no tenant relationship was found — ScholarSphere is self-built rather than a Figshare or Dataverse tenancy, which
is unusual for this cohort. The one real loss since the June 2026 profile is central IT''s developer portal at docs.developer.psu.edu,
which brokered internal REST services (PSU ID, Academic Course, Cornerstone, Sponsored Accounts, ASR Lookup) behind WebAccess
and now 302s to sites.psu.edu; the entry and its pointers have been removed rather than left standing as a dead claim.
What remains unreadable is by design: everything behind Shibboleth. Penn State also authors, but does not publicly host,
a SCIM 2.0 server implementation.'
generated: '2026-08-30'
method: probed
evidence:
- url: https://metadata.libraries.psu.edu/api-docs/v1/swagger.yaml
status: 200
- url: https://metadata.libraries.psu.edu/v1/organizations
status: 401
- url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/psu-libraries/scholarsphere/main/openapi.yml
status: 200
- url: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/api/v1/dois
status: 401
- url: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/oai?verb=Identify
status: 200
- url: https://as1.fim.psu.edu/idp/shibboleth
status: 200
- url: https://mdq.incommon.org/entities/urn%3Amace%3Aincommon%3Apsu.edu
status: 200
- url: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/v1/campuses
status: 200
- url: https://apps.opp.psu.edu/fis-api/health
status: 200
- url: https://docs.developer.psu.edu/
status: 302
note: Redirects to https://sites.psu.edu/ — the Penn State developer portal has been decommissioned.
- url: https://www.psu.edu/.well-known/security.txt
status: 404
common:
- type: Website
url: https://www.psu.edu/
- type: APIReference
url: https://metadata.libraries.psu.edu/api_docs
- type: Documentation
url: https://docs.scholarsphere.psu.edu/
- type: ResearchRepository
url: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/
- type: ResearchRepository
url: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/
- type: IdentityFederation
url: https://as1.fim.psu.edu/idp/shibboleth
- type: LibraryCatalog
url: https://libraries.psu.edu/
- type: CourseCatalog
url: https://bulletins.psu.edu/
- type: OpenData
url: https://www.datacommons.psu.edu/
- type: AIPolicy
url: https://ai.psu.edu/explore/guidelines
- type: AITooling
url: https://ai.psu.edu/
- type: GitHubOrganization
url: https://github.com/PennState
- type: SourceCode
url: https://github.com/psu-libraries
- type: PrivacyPolicy
url: https://www.psu.edu/web-privacy-statement
- type: LinkedIn
url: https://www.linkedin.com/school/penn-state-university/
- type: Conformance
url: conformance/pennsylvania-state-university-conformance.yml
- type: Authentication
url: authentication/pennsylvania-state-university-authentication.yml
- type: Errors
url: errors/pennsylvania-state-university-problem-types.yml
- type: AgenticAccess
url: agentic-access/pennsylvania-state-university-agentic-access.yml
- type: TrustCenter
url: security/pennsylvania-state-university-trust-center.yml
- type: VulnerabilityDisclosure
url: security/pennsylvania-state-university-vulnerability-disclosure.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
url: security/pennsylvania-state-university-domain-security.yml
- type: Plans
url: plans/pennsylvania-state-university-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
url: rate-limits/pennsylvania-state-university-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
url: finops/pennsylvania-state-university-finops.yml
- type: Review
url: review.yml
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
email: kin@apievangelist.com
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