University of Bristol

aid: university-of-bristol
name: University of Bristol
x-type: university
x-category: Public Research University
description: 'The University of Bristol is a public research university in Bristol, United Kingdom, and a member of the Russell
  Group. Its programmable footprint is small, real, and mostly indirect: it operates no developer portal, no open-data platform
  and no central API programme, and api.bris.ac.uk, developer.bristol.ac.uk, timetable.bristol.ac.uk and status.bristol.ac.uk
  do not resolve. The one institution-operated, keyless, machine-readable API surface found is the University of Bristol Research
  Portal OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint at research-information.bris.ac.uk, which advertises 590,974 records across 3,878 sets in seven
  metadata formats including the OpenAIRE CERIF 1.2 profile, with no authentication — although its mandatory Identify verb
  returns HTTP 500. Beyond it, Bristol operates a Shibboleth SAML 2.0 identity provider registered in the UK Access Management
  Federation since 2010 and asserting REFEDS Research & Scholarship, and data.bris, its own research data repository, which
  has minted 1,552 DataCite DOIs under the institution''s own prefix 10.5523/bris since 2012. Everything else that looks like
  a Bristol API is a vendor''s contract running under Bristol''s name — Elsevier Pure for the research portal''s /ws/api web
  services, OCLC WorldCat Discovery for library search. Those relationships are recorded here as tenant surfaces; the vendors''
  contracts are not.'
type: Index
deliveryModel:
  model: saas
  open_source: false
  commercial: false
  callable_host: true
  label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
  confidence: high
  source:
  - openapi
  - probes
  generated: '2026-08-30'
  method: probed
accessModel:
  pricing: free
  onboarding: none
  trial: false
  try_now: true
  public: true
  label: Free · No signup, no key
  confidence: high
  source:
  - authentication
  - probes
  generated: '2026-08-30'
  method: probed
position: Producing
access: Public
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/university-of-bristol.png
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/university-of-bristol/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
tags:
- University
- Higher Education
- Education
- United Kingdom
- Russell Group
- Research Data
- Research Repository
- Metadata Harvesting
- OAI-PMH
- Identity Federation
- Open Data
created: '2026-06-03'
modified: '2026-08-30'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis:
- aid: university-of-bristol:research-portal-oai-pmh
  name: University of Bristol Research Portal OAI-PMH
  x-operator: institution
  description: The one institution-operated, keyless, machine-readable API surface the University of Bristol publishes. OAI-PMH
    2.0 metadata harvesting for the University of Bristol Research Portal, served from the university's own registrable domain
    under its own identifier namespace (oai:research-information.bris.ac.uk:...). Seven metadata formats are supported — mods,
    qdc, oai_dc, oai_cerif_openaire (OpenAIRE CERIF profile 1.2), xmetadiss, nl_didl and uketd_dc — across 3,878 sets, and
    ListRecords with oai_dc reports a completeListSize of 590,974 with a page size of 100. Five of the six verbs execute anonymously;
    Identify returns HTTP 500 with a Pure HTML error page, so the repository cannot describe itself, and that defect is recorded
    rather than smoothed over. The research-information system behind the portal is Elsevier Pure, but this interface is an
    open protocol on the institution's host under the institution's identity — Elsevier's own product API at /ws/api is a
    separate, vendor-owned surface and is recorded below as a tenant relationship, not as Bristol's.
  humanURL: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/oai?verb=ListSets
  baseURL: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/oai
  tags:
  - OAI-PMH
  - Metadata Harvesting
  - Research Repository
  - Research Data
  - Publications
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/university-of-bristol-research-portal-oai-pmh-openapi.yml
  - type: Examples
    url: examples/university-of-bristol-oai-pmh-examples.json
  - type: Errors
    url: errors/university-of-bristol-oai-pmh-errors.yml
  - type: Conformance
    url: conformance/university-of-bristol-domain-standards.yml
  - type: Vocabulary
    url: vocabulary/university-of-bristol-oai-pmh-vocabulary.yml
  - type: Rules
    url: rules/university-of-bristol-oai-pmh-spectral-rules.yml
  - type: Authentication
    url: authentication/university-of-bristol-authentication.yml
  - type: Lifecycle
    url: lifecycle/university-of-bristol-lifecycle.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html
- aid: university-of-bristol:idp-shibboleth
  name: University of Bristol Identity Provider (Shibboleth / SAML 2.0)
  x-operator: institution
  description: Bristol operates its own Shibboleth identity provider at idp.bris.ac.uk, publishing SAML 2.0 metadata anonymously
    at /idp/shibboleth (200, application/xml, 5,990 bytes) and registered in the UK Access Management Federation as entityID
    https://idp.bris.ac.uk/shibboleth, OrganizationName "University of Bristol", registrationAuthority http://ukfederation.org.uk,
    registrationInstant 2010-09-09T16:18:44Z, with shibmd:Scope bris.ac.uk. The entity asserts the REFEDS Research & Scholarship
    entity category. Both an IDPSSODescriptor and an AttributeAuthorityDescriptor are present, with Shibboleth, SAML2 Redirect,
    SAML2 POST and SAML2 POST-SimpleSign SSO bindings. A second, hide-from-discovery test IdP (idp-dev.isys.bris.ac.uk, registered
    2016-11-15) and one Bristol-owned service provider (bristoluniversitypressdigital.com, registered 2022-01-26) are registered
    under the same organization. Institution-operated by definition; the machine-readable artifact is XML metadata rather
    than an HTTP API, so no OpenAPI is claimed.
  humanURL: https://idp.bris.ac.uk/idp/shibboleth
  baseURL: https://idp.bris.ac.uk/idp/profile/SAML2/Redirect/SSO
  tags:
  - Identity Federation
  - SAML
  - Shibboleth
  - Single Sign-On
  - UK Access Management Federation
  properties:
  - type: IdentityFederation
    url: https://idp.bris.ac.uk/idp/shibboleth
  - type: Conformance
    url: conformance/university-of-bristol-domain-standards.yml
  - type: Authentication
    url: authentication/university-of-bristol-authentication.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://metadata.ukfederation.org.uk/ukfederation-metadata.xml
- aid: university-of-bristol:data-bris-research-data-repository
  name: data.bris Research Data Repository
  x-operator: institution
  description: 'data.bris is the University of Bristol''s own research data repository — institution-built and institution-hosted,
    not a Figshare, Dataverse or DSpace tenancy. DataCite lists it as client BL.BRISTOL, "University of Bristol", a member
    since 2012, and 1,552 DOIs have been minted under the institution''s own prefix 10.5523/bris. It is a repository rather
    than an API: no search, OAI-PMH or REST interface answered on this host, and https://data.bris.ac.uk/data/oai returned
    404. The dataset payload index at /datasets/ is a plain HTML directory listing served anonymously. Recorded honestly as
    an operational problem, not padded over: the DataCite-registered landing-page base https://data.bris.ac.uk/data/ returned
    HTTP 200 carrying a "504 Gateway Timeout" body on first request and then reset the connection on every subsequent attempt
    across a twenty-minute window on 2026-08-30, so every one of those 1,552 DOIs currently resolves (302) to an unreachable
    page.'
  humanURL: https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/
  baseURL: https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/
  tags:
  - Research Data
  - Open Data
  - Research Repository
  - DataCite
  - DOI
  properties:
  - type: OpenData
    url: https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/
  - type: Conformance
    url: conformance/university-of-bristol-domain-standards.yml
  - type: Lifecycle
    url: lifecycle/university-of-bristol-lifecycle.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/staff/researchers/data/
- aid: university-of-bristol:pure-web-services
  name: Elsevier Pure Web Services (University of Bristol tenancy)
  x-operator: tenant
  description: 'TENANT RELATIONSHIP, NOT A BRISTOL CONTRACT. Bristol runs Elsevier Pure as its research information system,
    and Pure''s product API answers on Bristol''s own host at research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/api. The data is Bristol''s;
    the contract is Elsevier''s. The live OpenAPI at /ws/api/openapi.json (200, 1,740,065 bytes) declares info.title "Pure
    API", info.contact.email pure-support@elsevier.com, version 5.35.3-4 and a RELATIVE servers[] entry of /ws/api across
    826 paths — a hostless spec that a host-based verdict cannot classify, which is exactly the class this pipeline exists
    to catch. Access is api-key gated with no self-serve issuance: GET /ws/api/524/research-outputs returned 401. Per pipeline-university.md
    the relationship is recorded and the vendor''s contract is NOT saved under this institution''s slug; it belongs to Elsevier''s
    own repo. A hand-authored 493-line subset of it, plus twenty-nine artifacts derived from it, were removed from this repository
    on 2026-08-30 — see x-attribution-correction.'
  humanURL: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/api/524/api-docs/index.html
  baseURL: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/api
  tags:
  - Research Repository
  - Research Information
  - Elsevier Pure
  - Tenant
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/api/524/api-docs/index.html
  - type: Authentication
    url: authentication/university-of-bristol-authentication.yml
- aid: university-of-bristol:library-discovery-worldcat
  name: University of Bristol Library Discovery (OCLC WorldCat Discovery)
  x-operator: tenant
  description: TENANT RELATIONSHIP, NOT A BRISTOL CONTRACT. Bristol's library discovery layer is an OCLC WorldCat Discovery
    tenancy at bris.on.worldcat.org — an institution-specific subdomain on the vendor's platform (200 on 2026-08-30). Bristol
    also holds an Ex Libris SAML service provider registered in the UK Access Management Federation at bristol-shib.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com.
    Neither the OCLC nor the Ex Libris contract is Bristol's engineering and neither is saved here. Recorded because the tenancy
    is a real institutional fact and one of the few programmable surfaces the library has.
  humanURL: https://bris.on.worldcat.org/
  baseURL: https://bris.on.worldcat.org/
  tags:
  - Library
  - Library Catalog
  - Discovery
  - Tenant
  properties:
  - type: LibraryCatalog
    url: https://bris.on.worldcat.org/
common:
- type: Website
  url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/
- type: Portal
  url: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/
- type: ResearchRepository
  url: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/
- type: ResearchRepository
  url: https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/
- type: OpenData
  url: https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/
- type: IdentityFederation
  url: https://idp.bris.ac.uk/idp/shibboleth
- type: IdentityFederation
  url: https://www.ukfederation.org.uk/
- type: LibraryCatalog
  url: https://bris.on.worldcat.org/
- type: AIPolicy
  url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/bilt/sharing-practice/guides/guidance-on-ai/
- type: AIPolicy
  url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/academic-quality/pg/ai-tools-and-thesis-writing/
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/uob-hpc
- type: SourceCode
  url: https://github.com/cs-uob
- type: Documentation
  url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/staff/researchers/data/
- type: TermsOfService
  url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/web/policies/terms/
- type: PrivacyPolicy
  url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/privacy/
- type: Support
  url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/it-services/advice/
- type: LinkedIn
  url: https://www.linkedin.com/school/university-of-bristol/
- type: Conformance
  url: conformance/university-of-bristol-domain-standards.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/university-of-bristol-authentication.yml
- type: Lifecycle
  url: lifecycle/university-of-bristol-lifecycle.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/university-of-bristol-domain-security.yml
- type: Plans
  url: plans/university-of-bristol-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
  url: rate-limits/university-of-bristol-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
  url: finops/university-of-bristol-finops.yml
- type: Review
  url: review.yml
x-coverage:
  state: covered
  reason: covered
  detail: 'One institution-operated, keyless, machine-readable API surface was found, verified and catalogued — the University
    of Bristol Research Portal OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint at research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/oai, advertising 590,974 records
    across 3,878 sets in seven metadata formats including the OpenAIRE CERIF 1.2 profile, with every tested verb executing
    anonymously. Two live defects were observed there and are documented rather than hidden: verb=Identify returns HTTP 500
    with an HTML page instead of the mandatory OAI-PMH self-description, and ListRecords under oai_cerif_openaire for openaire_cris_persons
    returns an empty first page while advertising completeListSize=9750. Two further institution-operated surfaces were confirmed:
    the Shibboleth SAML 2.0 identity provider at idp.bris.ac.uk, in the UK Access Management Federation since 2010-09-09 asserting
    REFEDS Research & Scholarship; and data.bris, Bristol''s own research data repository, DataCite client BL.BRISTOL with
    1,552 DOIs under prefix 10.5523/bris. Coverage is otherwise thin because it genuinely is: Bristol operates no developer
    portal and no open-data platform, and api.bris.ac.uk, developer.bristol.ac.uk, developer.bris.ac.uk, timetable.bristol.ac.uk,
    status.bristol.ac.uk and library-search.bristol.ac.uk do not resolve. The unit-programme-catalogue is a legacy JSP application
    that serves an obfuscated JavaScript shim to a plain client and 403s on its .jsa endpoints, so there is no course-catalog
    API. Two surface classes that look institutional are vendor contracts and are recorded as tenant relationships without
    their contracts — Elsevier Pure at /ws/api on Bristol''s own host, and OCLC WorldCat Discovery at bris.on.worldcat.org.
    data.bris.ac.uk/data/ is the one genuinely broken institutional surface: HTTP 200 carrying a 504 Gateway Timeout body,
    then connection resets, so all 1,552 DataCite DOIs currently resolve to an unreachable page. www.linkedin.com returns
    999 to non-browser clients; that is a bot block, and the pointer is LIVE, not dead.'
  assessed: '2026-08-30'
  method: pipeline-university.md STEP 1-6, live probes
  evidence:
  - url: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/oai?verb=ListMetadataFormats
    status: 200
  - url: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/oai?verb=ListSets
    status: 200
  - url: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
    status: 200
  - url: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/oai?verb=Identify
    status: 500
  - url: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/api/openapi.json
    status: 200
  - url: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/api/524/research-outputs
    status: 401
  - url: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/api/524/api-docs/index.html
    status: 200
  - url: https://idp.bris.ac.uk/idp/shibboleth
    status: 200
  - url: https://metadata.ukfederation.org.uk/ukfederation-metadata.xml
    status: 200
  - url: https://api.datacite.org/clients?query=bristol
    status: 200
  - url: https://api.datacite.org/dois?client-id=bl.bristol
    status: 200
  - url: https://data.bris.ac.uk/datasets/
    status: 200
  - url: https://data.bris.ac.uk/
    status: 200
  - url: https://data.bris.ac.uk/data/
    status: 0
  - url: https://data.bris.ac.uk/data/oai?verb=Identify
    status: 404
  - url: https://bris.on.worldcat.org/
    status: 200
  - url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/
    status: 200
  - url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/unit-programme-catalogue/
    status: 200
  - url: https://www.bris.ac.uk/unit-programme-catalogue/
    status: 403
  - url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/llms.txt
    status: 404
  - url: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/.well-known/security.txt
    status: 404
  - url: https://www.linkedin.com/school/university-of-bristol/
    status: 999
  - url: https://api.bris.ac.uk/
    status: 0
  - url: https://developer.bristol.ac.uk/
    status: 0
  - url: https://developer.bris.ac.uk/
    status: 0
  - url: https://timetable.bristol.ac.uk/
    status: 0
  - url: https://status.bristol.ac.uk/
    status: 0
  - url: https://library-search.bristol.ac.uk/
    status: 0
x-attribution-correction:
  applied: '2026-08-30'
  by: pipeline-university.md STEP 6b, file-by-file
  removed_entries: 4
  removed_files: 30
  what: Four apis[] entries and thirty artifact files, all derived from ONE saved copy of Elsevier's Pure product contract.
    openapi/_original/university-of-bristol-pure-research-api.yaml carried info.title "Pure API" and a description that names
    "the University of Bristol Research Portal (Pure, by Elsevier)" outright; it was a hand-authored 493-line read-only subset
    of a vendor document, and it rewrote the contact from Elsevier's real pure-support@elsevier.com to a pure-support@bristol.ac.uk
    address that does not appear in the live specification, and stated version 5.34.1 where the live document says 5.35.3-4.
    refine-openapis then split it into four per-tag documents (data-set, person, project, research-output) and four apis[]
    entries, three JSON Schemas, three JSON Structures, three example sets, eight collection documents, a JSON-LD context,
    a vocabulary, two rulesets, an agentic-access card, capability edges and two refine reports were derived from it. Every
    one inherited Elsevier's provenance.
  audit-divergence: 'audit-university-contracts.py reaches its verdict from the HOSTNAME, and research-information.bris.ac.uk
    IS a bris.ac.uk subdomain, so the audit read all nine surfaces here as `institution` and reported hostless: none, shared_contract:
    none, misbased: none. That verdict is right about the host and wrong about the contract. This is the `shared_contract`
    class the contract describes for Pure and Dataverse deployments: the deployment is Bristol''s, the document is the vendor''s.
    Two things kept it out of the cohort-derived detector — the saved copy''s title had been localized away from the vendor''s
    own, and the live document''s servers[] entry is the RELATIVE /ws/api, so host_of() returns nothing. The x-operator values
    in this file are the more precise call, reached from what each surface says about itself. Do not let a later host-based
    pass overwrite them.'
  shared-contract-false-positive: The audit flags openapi/university-of-bristol-research-portal-oai-pmh-openapi.yml as a shared
    contract because the University of York ships a spec whose normalized title matches ("<Institution> Research Portal OAI-PMH").
    It is not shared. Both were independently derived from each institution's own live endpoint, and the documents differ
    in host, metadata formats, set hierarchy, record count and observed defects — Bristol advertises seven metadata formats
    including uketd_dc and the OpenAIRE CERIF 1.2 profile across 3,878 sets with a broken Identify verb. This is the same
    class of false positive the contract already records for Washington's uw.edu contact domain and for Macquarie's OAI-PMH
    document.
  own-domain-note: Bristol uses TWO registrable domains — bristol.ac.uk for the public web and the legacy bris.ac.uk for research-information,
    idp and data.bris. Both are Bristol's. A `Portal` pointer to https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ is present in common[]
    specifically so institution_domains() in audit-university-contracts.py can see bris.ac.uk; without it the audit reads
    every one of this repo's own hosts as `unknown`.
  note: The tenant relationship was NOT deleted. Bristol genuinely runs Pure, the data in it is Bristol's, and the relationship
    survives as university-of-bristol:pure-web-services with x-operator tenant. Only the contract and its derivatives went.
    In their place the repository now holds a contract for a surface Bristol actually operates itself — the OAI-PMH endpoint
    — derived from live probes, not from documentation and not from another institution's deployment.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com