Sorbonne University
Sorbonne University (Sorbonne Universite) is a public research university in Paris, France, formed in 2018 from the merger of Paris-Sorbonne and Pierre et Marie Curie universities, serving roughly 53,000 students across faculties of Arts & Humanities, Health Sciences, and Science & Engineering. It operates no central developer portal, no open-data portal, and no institution-operated REST API, and this profile says so rather than padding the gap. What it does operate, and self-publish, is a complete machine-readable SAML 2.0 identity federation contract. The identity provider at auth.id.sorbonne-universite.fr serves a signed EntityDescriptor at a dereferenceable entityID, is registered in the RENATER federation with the REFEDS Research & Scholarship entity category and a SIRTFI assurance certification, and reaches the world through eduGAIN. Operator was settled by IP ownership rather than hostname: it CNAMEs to llng.sorbonne-universite.fr and resolves into FR-UPMC-NET, the university's own RIPE allocation at 4 Place Jussieu, behind an organization-validated GEANT TCS certificate issued to O=SORBONNE UNIVERSITE, running self-hosted LemonLDAP::NG. Three further RENATER service providers — including the 4EU+ virtual campus platform and a federated-wifi portal — sit on the university's own production estate. SAML is therefore Sorbonne's only institution-operated education-regime conformance, and Shibboleth is deliberately not claimed: the stack is LemonLDAP::NG and SimpleSAMLphp, not Shibboleth. Everything else that looks like a Sorbonne API is a national or commercial platform on which the university holds an account, and is recorded here as a tenant relationship rather than as a Sorbonne contract: the HAL open archive and its OAI-PMH and Solr search endpoints are CCSD's (CNRS), the sorbonne-univ research-data collection runs on Recherche Data Gouv's Dataverse with DOIs minted under Recherche Data Gouv's DataCite account, and library discovery is Ex Libris Primo/Alma. The GitHub organization exists and holds no public repositories. The university's own HAL portal host serves an Anubis proof-of-work bot challenge, so the one institutional research surface on a Sorbonne domain is closed to agents.
Sorbonne University publishes 5 APIs on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Education, Higher Education, University, France, and Identity Federation.
The Sorbonne University catalog on APIs.io includes 1 JSON-LD context.
Sorbonne University’s developer surface includes support, engineering blog, GitHub presence, and 17 more developer resources.
5 APIs
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
aid: sorbonne
name: Sorbonne University
description: 'Sorbonne University (Sorbonne Universite) is a public research university in Paris, France, formed in 2018 from
the merger of Paris-Sorbonne and Pierre et Marie Curie universities, serving roughly 53,000 students across faculties of
Arts & Humanities, Health Sciences, and Science & Engineering. It operates no central developer portal, no open-data portal,
and no institution-operated REST API, and this profile says so rather than padding the gap.
What it does operate, and self-publish, is a complete machine-readable SAML 2.0 identity federation contract. The identity
provider at auth.id.sorbonne-universite.fr serves a signed EntityDescriptor at a dereferenceable entityID, is registered
in the RENATER federation with the REFEDS Research & Scholarship entity category and a SIRTFI assurance certification, and
reaches the world through eduGAIN. Operator was settled by IP ownership rather than hostname: it CNAMEs to llng.sorbonne-universite.fr
and resolves into FR-UPMC-NET, the university''s own RIPE allocation at 4 Place Jussieu, behind an organization-validated
GEANT TCS certificate issued to O=SORBONNE UNIVERSITE, running self-hosted LemonLDAP::NG. Three further RENATER service
providers — including the 4EU+ virtual campus platform and a federated-wifi portal — sit on the university''s own production
estate. SAML is therefore Sorbonne''s only institution-operated education-regime conformance, and Shibboleth is deliberately
not claimed: the stack is LemonLDAP::NG and SimpleSAMLphp, not Shibboleth.
Everything else that looks like a Sorbonne API is a national or commercial platform on which the university holds an account,
and is recorded here as a tenant relationship rather than as a Sorbonne contract: the HAL open archive and its OAI-PMH and
Solr search endpoints are CCSD''s (CNRS), the sorbonne-univ research-data collection runs on Recherche Data Gouv''s Dataverse
with DOIs minted under Recherche Data Gouv''s DataCite account, and library discovery is Ex Libris Primo/Alma. The GitHub
organization exists and holds no public repositories. The university''s own HAL portal host serves an Anubis proof-of-work
bot challenge, so the one institutional research surface on a Sorbonne domain is closed to agents.'
type: Index
x-type: university
x-category: Public Research University
deliveryModel:
model: saas
open_source: false
commercial: true
callable_host: false
label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
confidence: medium
source:
- pricing
generated: '2026-08-28'
method: derived
accessModel:
pricing: free
onboarding: institutional
trial: false
try_now: false
public: false
label: Free · Institutional affiliation or federation membership required
confidence: high
source:
- identity-federation
- plans
generated: '2026-08-30'
method: derived
position: Consuming
access: 3rd-Party
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/sorbonne.png
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/sorbonne/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
tags:
- Education
- Higher Education
- University
- France
- Identity Federation
- Research Repository
- Research Data
- Library
- Open Access
- Open Science
created: '2026-06-03'
modified: '2026-08-30'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis:
- aid: sorbonne:identity-provider
name: Sorbonne University Identity Provider (SAML 2.0)
x-operator: institution
description: 'Sorbonne University''s federated login, published as a signed SAML 2.0 EntityDescriptor at https://auth.id.sorbonne-universite.fr/saml/metadata
(HTTP 200, application/xml, 11,704 bytes). Declares HTTP-Redirect, HTTP-POST and HTTP-Artifact single sign-on bindings,
SOAP/Redirect/POST single logout, six NameID formats including Kerberos and transient, a signing key descriptor, and a
shibmd:Scope of sorbonne-universite.fr. The entity is registered in the RENATER federation (registration authority https://federation.renater.fr/,
registered 2021-10-07), carries the REFEDS Research & Scholarship entity category and a REFEDS SIRTFI assurance certification,
and interfederates into eduGAIN.
This is institution-operated, and the operator verdict was settled by address space rather than hostname: the host CNAMEs
to llng.sorbonne-universite.fr and resolves to 134.157.54.171 inside FR-UPMC-NET (RIPE, "4 Place Jussieu, 75252 Paris
CEDEX 05"), announced from AS1307 and AS2200, behind an organization-validated GEANT TCS certificate issued to O=SORBONNE
UNIVERSITE, running self-hosted LemonLDAP::NG. It is the only institution-operated machine-readable contract in this profile.'
humanURL: https://met.refeds.org/met/entity/https%3A%2F%2Fauth.id.sorbonne-universite.fr%2Fsaml%2Fmetadata/
baseURL: https://auth.id.sorbonne-universite.fr/saml/
tags:
- Identity Federation
- SAML
- Single Sign-On
- RENATER
- eduGAIN
- Authentication
properties:
- type: Metadata
url: https://auth.id.sorbonne-universite.fr/saml/metadata
- type: IdentityFederation
url: identity-federation/sorbonne-identity-federation.yml
- type: Conformance
url: conformance/sorbonne-conformance.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://services.renater.fr/federation/en/documentation/engagement-conformite/metadata_registration_practice_statement
- aid: sorbonne:hal-oai
name: HAL Sorbonne Universite Open Archive — OAI-PMH (Sorbonne scope)
x-operator: tenant
description: 'Sorbonne University''s open archive of scholarly publications, harvestable over OAI-PMH 2.0 at the Sorbonne-scoped
base URL https://api.archives-ouvertes.fr/oai/sorbonne-universite/, which returns a valid Identify response (HTTP 200,
text/xml) declaring protocolVersion 2.0, an earliestDatestamp of 2002-09-23, YYYY-MM-DD granularity and repositoryIdentifier
hal.archives-ouvertes.fr.
Recorded as a tenant relationship, not as a Sorbonne contract. The deposits and the harvest scope are Sorbonne''s; the
endpoint, the software and the administrative contact (contact@archives-ouvertes.fr) belong to CCSD, the CNRS unit that
operates the national HAL infrastructure. The previous profile pointed this entry at the generic /oai/hal/ base URL, which
is the whole-of-France endpoint three other institutions in this cohort also claimed; it has been re-based onto the Sorbonne
scope.
The operator verdict was corroborated by address space rather than hostname, the same test applied to the identity provider.
Even the Sorbonne-branded portal host is not Sorbonne''s: hal.sorbonne-universite.fr is a CNAME to hal-sorbonne-universite.archives-ouvertes.fr,
which resolves to 193.48.96.10 — CCSD''s address space, not FR-UPMC-NET. There is no HAL infrastructure on Sorbonne hardware.'
humanURL: https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/
baseURL: https://api.archives-ouvertes.fr/oai/sorbonne-universite/
tags:
- Open Access
- Open Science
- OAI-PMH
- Repository
- Publications
- Metadata
properties:
- type: Documentation
url: https://api.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/oai
- type: Website
url: https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/
- aid: sorbonne:hal-search
name: HAL Search API — SORBONNE-UNIVERSITE collection
x-operator: tenant
description: 'The HAL Solr search API scoped to Sorbonne University''s collection at https://api.archives-ouvertes.fr/search/SORBONNE-UNIVERSITE/,
which returns 326,851 records (HTTP 200, application/json) with faceting and field selection over the university''s affiliated
publications; 211,514 of those records carry ORCID identifiers in authORCIDIdExt_s.
Tenant, for the same reason as the OAI endpoint: the collection is Sorbonne''s, the Solr index and the API contract are
CCSD''s. The previous profile pointed at the generic /search/ base URL shared by every French institution.'
humanURL: https://api.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/search
baseURL: https://api.archives-ouvertes.fr/search/SORBONNE-UNIVERSITE/
tags:
- Search
- Open Access
- Publications
- Metadata
- ORCID
properties:
- type: Documentation
url: https://api.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/search
- aid: sorbonne:dataverse
name: Recherche Data Gouv Dataverse — sorbonne-univ collection
x-operator: tenant
description: 'Sorbonne University''s research-data collection on the French national Recherche Data Gouv repository, addressable
through the Dataverse Native REST API at https://entrepot.recherche.data.gouv.fr/api/dataverses/sorbonne-univ (HTTP 200,
application/json), which returns the collection record with dataverseType ORGANIZATIONS_INSTITUTIONS, creationDate 2022-12-01
and the institutional contact data-bsu@sorbonne-universite.fr; /contents lists 21 items whose datasets carry DOIs under
authority 10.57745.
Tenant: the datasets, the curation and the contact are Sorbonne''s, while the Dataverse 6.0 platform is operated by INRAE
for the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, and the DOIs are minted under Recherche Data Gouv''s DataCite account
(provider rdg, client rdg.prod). Sorbonne holds no DataCite membership of its own.
The recorded baseURL is the Sorbonne-scoped collection path. The bare Dataverse root https://entrepot.recherche.data.gouv.fr/api/
answers 404 and is in any case the generic all-of-France base every French institution on this platform shares, which
is the same shared-base defect corrected on the two HAL entries.'
humanURL: https://entrepot.recherche.data.gouv.fr/dataverse/sorbonne-univ
baseURL: https://entrepot.recherche.data.gouv.fr/api/dataverses/sorbonne-univ
tags:
- Research Data
- Dataverse
- Open Data
- Open Science
- REST
- DataCite
properties:
- type: Documentation
url: https://guides.dataverse.org/en/latest/api/native-api.html
- type: Website
url: https://entrepot.recherche.data.gouv.fr/dataverse/sorbonne-univ
- aid: sorbonne:library-discovery
name: Sorbonne University Libraries — Ex Libris Primo discovery
x-operator: tenant
description: 'Library discovery for Sorbonne University''s letters, sciences and medicine libraries, running on Ex Libris
Primo over the Alma library services platform, at the institution-specific view https://sorbonne-universite.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=33BSU_INST:33BSU
(HTTP 200). Sorbonne selected Alma and Primo in 2020.
Tenant. The holdings, the institution code 33BSU and the view configuration are Sorbonne''s; the platform, the host and
every API contract over it are Ex Libris / Clarivate''s, and the Primo and Alma APIs are gated behind an Ex Libris developer
account, so nothing callable is published under Sorbonne''s name.'
humanURL: https://sorbonne-universite.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=33BSU_INST:33BSU
baseURL: https://sorbonne-universite.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/
tags:
- Library
- Discovery
- Primo
- Alma
- Catalog
properties:
- type: Documentation
url: https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/primo/apis/
- type: Website
url: https://sorbonne-universite.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=33BSU_INST:33BSU
common:
- type: Website
url: https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/en
- type: IdentityFederation
url: identity-federation/sorbonne-identity-federation.yml
- type: Conformance
url: conformance/sorbonne-conformance.yml
- type: ResearchRepository
url: https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/
- type: ResearchData
url: https://entrepot.recherche.data.gouv.fr/dataverse/sorbonne-univ
- type: LibraryCatalog
url: https://sorbonne-universite.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=33BSU_INST:33BSU
- type: ResearchComputing
url: https://sacado.sorbonne-universite.fr/
- type: AIPolicy
url: https://sante.sorbonne-universite.fr/actualites/recommandations-dutilisation-de-lintelligence-artificielle-generative-dans-le-cadre-de
- type: TermsOfService
url: https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/legal-notice
- type: PrivacyPolicy
url: https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/data-protection-policy
- type: Support
url: https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/contact-us
- type: Blog
url: https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/news
- type: BlogRSS
url: https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/rss.xml
- type: GitHub
url: https://github.com/sorbonne-universite
- type: LinkedIn
url: https://www.linkedin.com/school/sorbonne-universite/
- type: DomainSecurity
url: security/sorbonne-domain-security.yml
- type: Plans
url: plans/sorbonne-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
url: rate-limits/sorbonne-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
url: finops/sorbonne-finops.yml
- type: Review
url: review.yml
x-coverage:
state: covered
reason: no_public_api
detail: 'Sorbonne University publishes no public developer-facing API, no developer portal, no open-data portal and no OpenAPI,
AsyncAPI or other open specification. DNS resolution of api., data., opendata., calcul., hpc., bibliotheque., catalogue.,
edt. and eight further candidate subdomains under sorbonne-universite.fr returned NXDOMAIN for all but sacado (research
computing, HTML only) and intranet; www.sorbonne-universite.fr returns 404 for /llms.txt, /.well-known/security.txt and
/.well-known/apis.json; the GitHub organization github.com/sorbonne-universite exists and holds zero public repositories.
That is the honest result and it is recorded rather than padded.
One institution-operated machine-readable contract WAS found, and it is not a REST API: the SAML 2.0 EntityDescriptor
the university self-publishes at auth.id.sorbonne-universite.fr, verified institution-operated by RIPE address space (FR-UPMC-NET),
a GEANT TCS certificate issued to O=SORBONNE UNIVERSITE, and a self-hosted LemonLDAP::NG stack. Four RENATER entities
in total, all on the university''s own infrastructure. That is the single institution-operated conformance in the education
regime (saml), and shibboleth is deliberately not claimed because the software is LemonLDAP::NG and SimpleSAMLphp.
Four further surfaces are real institutional facts on platforms Sorbonne does not operate, and are recorded as tenant
relationships with their contracts deliberately not saved here: HAL (CCSD/CNRS) for the open archive and its OAI-PMH and
Solr endpoints, Recherche Data Gouv (INRAE) for the research-data collection and its DataCite DOI minting, and Ex Libris
Primo/Alma for library discovery. The two HAL entries carried the generic all-of-France base URLs in the June 2026 profile
— /oai/hal/ and /search/ — which three other institutions in this cohort also claim; both have been re-based onto the
Sorbonne-scoped paths.
One access obstacle worth naming: hal.sorbonne-universite.fr, the only research surface on a Sorbonne domain, answers
200 with an Anubis proof-of-work bot challenge (c2sd-an-auth / c2sd-an-cookie-verification cookies) under a browser User-Agent,
so it is live to humans and closed to agents; that host is itself a CNAME into CCSD address space (hal-sorbonne-universite.archives-ouvertes.fr,
193.48.96.10), so it is not a Sorbonne-operated surface either. The institutional AI page at /universite/politique-detablissement/intelligence-artificielle
returns 403; the reachable AI-governance document is the Faculty of Health''s generative-AI research recommendations,
in French only.'
evidence:
- url: https://auth.id.sorbonne-universite.fr/saml/metadata
status: 200
- url: https://metadata.federation.renater.fr/renater/main/main-all-renater-metadata.xml
status: 200
- url: https://api.archives-ouvertes.fr/oai/sorbonne-universite/?verb=Identify
status: 200
- url: https://api.archives-ouvertes.fr/search/SORBONNE-UNIVERSITE/?q=*:*&rows=1
status: 200
- url: https://entrepot.recherche.data.gouv.fr/api/dataverses/sorbonne-univ
status: 200
- url: https://sorbonne-universite.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=33BSU_INST:33BSU
status: 200
- url: https://github.com/sorbonne-universite
status: 200
- url: https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/llms.txt
status: 404
- url: https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/.well-known/security.txt
status: 404
- url: https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/.well-known/apis.json
status: 404
- url: https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/
status: 200
- url: https://www.sorbonne-universite.fr/universite/politique-detablissement/intelligence-artificielle
status: 403
probed: '2026-08-30'
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
email: kin@apievangelist.com
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