# UCL

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/ucl/  
**Website:** https://www.ucl.ac.uk/  
**APIs profiled:** 6

University College London (UCL) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom, and a member of the Russell Group. UCL is the clearest illustration in this cohort of why a university is a federation of buyers rather than a producer of APIs. Its flagship developer surface, UCL API (uclapi.com) — a student-built, ISD-backed, open-source, OAuth2-secured platform exposing room bookings, timetables, staff search, desktop and study-space availability and workspaces — was genuinely UCL's own engineering, and as of 2026-08-19 its entire estate is gone: uclapi.com, api.uclapi.com, docs.uclapi.com and status.uclapi.com all fail to complete a TCP connection on either port 80 or 443. The source repository remains public and unarchived (github.com/uclapi/uclapi, last pushed 2026-05-06); the OpenAPI repository was archived in 2021. What remains is almost entirely bought, not built. UCL Discovery, the open-access institutional repository, is the one institution-operated machine-readable surface left standing: EPrints on UCL's own domain with an OAI-PMH endpoint, currently behind a Cloudflare challenge. Everything else is a tenancy — the UCL Research Data Repository is Figshare (rdr.ucl.ac.uk CNAMEs to figshare.com, UCL's data addressed as institution=549 on Figshare's shared host), UCL Profiles is Symplectic Elements (profiles.ucl.ac.uk CNAMEs to ucl.discovery.symplectic.org), library discovery is Ex Libris Primo VE, site search is Funnelback, and even UCL's UK Access Management Federation identity provider — the one class of surface a university is supposed to operate by definition — resolves its SAML SSO to OpenAthens rather than to a UCL host. UCL owns the entityID, the ucl.ac.uk scope and the DataCite DOI prefix 10.5522; vendors run the services underneath them. No central developer portal, no open data portal and no publicly callable institution-operated API were found in this pass.

## Kin Score — 21.2 / 100 (emerging)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: falling (-19.5 from 40.7).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 64.8 |
| Contract Quality | 0.0 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 26.3 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 16.7 |
| Commercial Clarity | 39.5 |
| Access Clarity | 39.5 |

Regulatory layer — **Education & Research**: 27.8 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 3.6 (human-only)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | no |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | na |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | na |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | na |

## Access

Free · Self-serve signup — onboarding: self-serve, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (6)

- **UCL Discovery — OAI-PMH** — UCL Discovery is UCL's open-access institutional repository of research outputs, running EPrints on UCL's own registrable domain, and it exposes an OAI-PMH 2.0 metadata-harvesti...
- **UCL Research Data Repository (Figshare tenancy)** — The UCL Research Data Repository is UCL's institutional data repository, used to deposit, archive, publish and mint DOIs for research datasets. The data, the curation policy and...
- **UCL Profiles / IRIS (Symplectic Elements tenancy)** — UCL Profiles is UCL's public research-information and researcher-profile directory, successor to the IRIS research portal (iris.ucl.ac.uk now redirects to it). It is a Symplecti...
- **UCL Library Discovery (Ex Libris Primo VE tenancy)** — UCL Library Services runs its catalog and discovery layer on Ex Libris Primo VE, at an institution-specific view on Ex Libris' shared host: ucl.primo.exlibrisgroup.com with vid=...
- **UCL site search (Funnelback tenancy)** — UCL's website and module-catalogue search runs on Funnelback (Squiz) at search2.ucl.ac.uk, on UCL's own registrable domain. It is the only surface in this profile that returns a...
- **UCL Identity Provider — UK Access Management Federation** — UCL is a registered Identity Provider in the UK Access Management Federation (Jisc), and by extension in eduGAIN. Its SAML metadata is published in the federation's machine-read...

## Security (1)

- **Ucl Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **Ucl Plans Pricing**

## Tags

Education, Higher Education, University, United Kingdom, London, Russell Group, Research, Open Access, Research Data, Research Repository, Library, Identity Federation, Research Computing, Course Catalog

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/ucl/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.