specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
provider: Qatar University
providerId: qatar
created: '2026-06-03'
modified: '2026-09-01'
reconciled: true
tags:
- Education
- Higher Education
- University
- Rate Limiting
description: >-
  Qatar University publishes no rate-limit policy for any surface, and none of its endpoints
  emits a rate-limit header. Verified by probe on 2026-09-01 against the QU Press OAI-PMH
  endpoint (journals.qu.edu.qa), the OpenID Connect provider (sso.qu.edu.qa) and the QSpace
  repository (qspace.qu.edu.qa): no X-RateLimit-*, no RateLimit-* (RFC 9239 draft), no
  Retry-After, and no documented harvesting policy on any of them. The absence is the finding;
  it is not evidence that harvesting is unlimited, and a large harvest may still be throttled
  or blocked at the edge without notice.
  Corrects the 2026-06-03 text, which described throttling on "OAI-PMH, IIIF, library"
  endpoints — Qatar University operates no IIIF service and no public library-catalog API, so
  two of those three surfaces do not exist.
notes: >-
  No per-service documentation to confirm against — none is published. Harvest responsibly:
  the QU Press OAI-PMH endpoint pages at the server's chosen size, and QSpace's pages 100
  records at a time via resumptionToken.
sources:
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/qatar/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
- url: 'https://journals.qu.edu.qa/index.php/index/oai?verb=Identify'
  status: 200
  observed: no rate-limit or Retry-After header
- url: https://sso.qu.edu.qa/oauth2/token/.well-known/openid-configuration
  status: 200
  observed: no rate-limit or Retry-After header
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
  observed: none — no 429 was returned by any endpoint during this run
limits:
- name: Default
  scope: client
  metric: requests-per-minute
  limit: none published
  notes: >-
    No published global limit and no observed limit. Verified absent rather than assumed: no
    rate-limit header was returned by any Qatar University endpoint probed on 2026-09-01.
policies:
- name: Backoff Strategy
  description: Exponential backoff with jitter; honor Retry-After; harvest during off-peak hours.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com