The APIs of the World's Top Universities — 634 of Them, and Most Are Library Plumbing

A profile of 219 top-ranked universities from the QS World University Rankings 2025 found 634 APIs across 40 countries, but 84% of schools expose an API only because their library runs an institutional repository speaking OAI-PMH, with just 16% running anything resembling a real developer program. The analysis highlights that the world’s best universities hold an enormous amount of structured data — research outputs, course catalogs, event feeds — with almost no front door to it for developers or AI agents. Only a handful of institutions like NUSMods have community-built API surfaces that go beyond the library plumbing layer.