---
name: King's College London
description: King's College London public developer/API footprint review for APIs.json cataloging.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/kings-college-london/refs/heads/main/review.yml
created: '2026-06-03'
modified: '2026-08-19'
reviews:
  - date: '2026-08-19'
    rating: 3
    summary: >-
      Re-profiled under the API Evangelist university pipeline, which settles WHO
      OPERATES a surface before crediting it. The 2026-06-03 review credited King's
      with the Figshare REST API; that was a vendor contract on a host twenty-five
      universities in this catalog claimed at once, and the ten OpenAPIs, eleven
      apis[] entries, twenty collection files and one agentic-access classification
      derived from it have been removed. In their place, one genuinely
      institution-operated API was found and verified: the King's e-Research AI Hub
      at ai.create.kcl.ac.uk, an OpenAI-compatible LLM inference platform King's
      built and runs on its own infrastructure for its own researchers. It is live
      and bearer-authenticated but publishes no contract and its reference is behind
      Entra ID. Four tenancies are recorded as relationships rather than as
      contracts: Elsevier Pure, Figshare, Ex Libris Primo and OpenAthens. King's is
      registered in the UK Access Management Federation and eduGAIN and holds its own
      DataCite membership. The rating rises by one because the profile is now
      accurate and names a real institutional API; the Kin Score will fall, because
      ten contracts that were never King's have gone.
    endpoints:
      - url: https://ai.create.kcl.ac.uk/api/v1/models
        status: 401
        note: >-
          Live institution-operated API. Returns the OpenAI error envelope; a request
          with an unknown bearer returns a different message, so the key is validated.
      - url: https://ai.create.kcl.ac.uk/openapi.json
        status: 404
        note: No machine-readable contract published at any conventional location.
      - url: https://docs.er.kcl.ac.uk/CREATE/ai_hub/
        status: 200
        note: King's own documentation for the AI Hub, on King's own host.
      - url: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/oai?verb=Identify
        status: 200
        note: >-
          Live Pure OAI-PMH. TENANT — kclpure.kcl.ac.uk CNAMEs to kings.elsevierpure.com.
      - url: http://metadata.ukfederation.org.uk/ukfederation-metadata.xml
        status: 200
        note: >-
          Contains entityID https://kclidp.kcl.ac.uk/idp/shibboleth, SIRTFI-certified,
          scope kcl.ac.uk, SSO endpoints on login.openathens.net — TENANT.
      - url: https://api.datacite.org/providers/hcbr
        status: 200
        note: >-
          King's own DataCite membership, ROR 0220mzb33, prefix 10.18742, 1,118 DOIs.
      - url: https://librarysearch.kcl.ac.uk/
        status: 200
        note: Ex Libris Primo, vid=44KCL_INST — TENANT.
      - url: https://keats.kcl.ac.uk/webservice/rest/server.php
        status: 200
        note: Moodle web services, hosted by ULCC/Cosector — TENANT.
      - url: https://api.kcl.ac.uk/
        status: 0
        note: >-
          Resolves to 137.73.130.161 but accepts no TCP connection on 80 or 443. Not a surface.
      - url: https://cloud.er.kcl.ac.uk/
        status: 0
        note: >-
          CREATE Cloud OpenStack API. No public DNS on 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 — VPN-only.
      - url: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/llms.txt
        status: 404
        note: No agent-guidance file published.
  - date: '2026-06-03'
    rating: 2
    summary: >-
      King's College London has no centralized public developer portal. Its
      verifiable machine-readable footprint is research and library
      infrastructure: the King's Research Portal (Pure) returns a live OAI-PMH
      response (HTTP 200, repositoryName "Pure OAI Repository"), and the King's
      research data repository is hosted on Figshare, whose public REST API and
      OAI-PMH endpoints both responded 200. The e-Research GitHub org
      (kcl-eresearch, ~86 repos) was confirmed. No endpoints were fabricated;
      only URLs that resolved live are cataloged.
    endpoints:
      - url: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/oai?verb=Identify
        status: 200
        note: Live Pure OAI-PMH Identify response (OpenAIRE CERIF profile).
      - url: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/OAIHandler?verb=Identify
        status: 405
        note: Legacy/alternate OAI path returns 405; canonical path is /ws/oai.
      - url: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/
        status: 200
        note: King's Research Portal (Pure) front end.
      - url: https://kcl.figshare.com/
        status: 202
        note: KCL-branded Figshare research repository front end.
      - url: https://api.figshare.com/v2/articles?page_size=1
        status: 200
        note: Figshare public REST API backing the repository.
      - url: https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai?verb=Identify
        status: 200
        note: Figshare OAI-PMH endpoint for metadata harvesting.
      - url: https://docs.er.kcl.ac.uk/
        status: 200
        note: King's e-Research documentation portal (gated tools/infrastructure).
      - url: https://github.com/kcl-eresearch
        status: 200
        note: Official King's e-Research GitHub organization (~86 repos).
      - url: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/
        status: 200
        note: Official institutional website.