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How to use Figshare’s OAI-PMH service

Figshare supports OAI-PMH, which gives a simple technical option for data providers to make their metadata available to services, based on the open standards HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol) and XML (Extensible Markup Language). For detailed information on OAI-PMH please visit: https://www.openarchives.org/pmh/

For Figshare’s OAI-PMH documentation please head to https://docs.figshare.com/#oai_pmh.

OAI-PMH provides a standard way to retrieve metadata records mapped to a standard metadata schema. Depending on the repository, you may have several metadata schema options. For example, Figshare provides 7 schema options: Dublin Core, Datacite, RDF, CERIF XML, Qualified Dublin Core, Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard, and UKETD_DC.

For example, this is useful for repositories that aggregate content. A national level repository could harvest metadata from all research repositories in the country that have an OAI-PMH endpoint. Because all the metadata will follow a standard schema and will be in the XML format, the aggregating repository doesn’t have to do a lot of reformatting to display the harvested metadata properly.

To see a what the metadata looks like visit https://docs.figshare.com/#oai_pmh_some_examples

Or paste the urls below into a bowser tab to see the first 10 records returned for each request:

When you request information from the OAI-PMH endpoint, Figshare labels the metadata content from the Figshare database that matches your requirements and provides it in the XML format.

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