specification: API Commons Plans
specificationVersion: '0.1'
provider: Semantic Scholar
providerId: semantic-scholar
created: '2026-06-12'
modified: '2026-06-12'
reconciled: true
type: freemium
description: >
  Semantic Scholar offers free API access to its academic graph. Unauthenticated requests
  share a rate-limited pool. A free API key (requested via the developer portal) provides
  a dedicated per-second rate. No paid commercial tiers are publicly listed; higher rate
  limits are granted on a case-by-case basis after review of the stated use case.
  Dataset bulk downloads require an API key and are also free.
plans:
  - name: Unauthenticated (Public)
    description: >
      Access the API without any credentials. Requests share a global rate limit pool
      with all other unauthenticated callers. Suitable only for ad-hoc exploration.
    type: free
    rateLimitRPS: null
    rateLimitShared: true
    rateLimitWindow: 300
    rateLimitRequests: 100
    authentication: none
    notes: >
      100 requests per 5 minutes shared pool. Performance may degrade during peak usage.
  - name: Authenticated (API Key)
    description: >
      Obtain a free API key by applying via the Semantic Scholar developer portal using
      a non-free-domain institutional email address. Provides a dedicated per-user rate
      limit across all endpoints.
    type: free
    rateLimitRPS: 1
    rateLimitShared: false
    authentication: api-key
    apiKeyHeader: x-api-key
    notes: >
      Introductory allowance of 1 request per second on all endpoints. May be increased
      after review. API keys inactive for ~60 days are automatically pruned. Applications
      from free email domains (gmail, yahoo, etc.) are no longer accepted. Third-party
      application key requests are not approved.
  - name: Dataset Access (API Key Required)
    description: >
      Bulk corpus downloads via the Datasets API endpoint. Requires an API key.
      Provides full and incremental (diff) snapshots of the academic graph updated monthly.
    type: free
    authentication: api-key
    apiKeyHeader: x-api-key
    notes: >
      Intended for researchers needing higher throughput than the per-second API key
      limit allows. Dataset releases are versioned and support diff-based incremental updates.