Ross Mounce (@rmounce.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy)

Figshare's OAI-PMH Interface is Broken Figshare, a hosted repository service, implements OAI-PMH... kinda. Repositories hosted on Figshare are forced to use the same OAI-PMH Base URL. As far as I can tell, Figshare uses OAI-PMH sets to differentiate between metadata records belonging to particular repositories. So, to give an example documented on the Figshare site, this is how you might harvest some OAI_DC formatted records from a particular repository: `https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=portal_63` It seems logical to _guess_ that "portal_63" represents a repository hosted on Figshare. However, I have no idea how you would determine the correct set to use for a given repository, or _vice versa_ , how you would determine the repository for a given set. I could find nothing in the documentation - _How to use Figshare’s OAI-PMH service_ - about this. This means that OAI-PMH's `Identify` verb is now **useless** in terms of being able to convey any information about a particular repository hosted on Figshare. `Identify` on the Figshare BaseURL does works properly: `https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai?verb=Identify` However, passing a set parameter is illegal in the OAI-PMH specification when combined with the `Identify` verb: `https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai?verb=Identify&set=portal_63` And, indeed, this gives an error on Figshare. The `Identify` verb is an important part of the specification. It is commonly used not only to gather some basic information about a repository - such as its name & contact details, but also simply to check that the repository's OAI-PMH interface is functioning. For example, the International Repositories Directory (IRD) automatically checks that repositories have a working OAI-PMH interface by sending a `verb=Identify` request. This will currently fail for all Figshare hosted repositories. This could have been avoided by making the "portal_63" component part of the OAI-PMH Base URL path for each repository, instead of over-loading the OAI-PMH sets feature, something like: `https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai/portal_63?verb=Identify` https://www.paulwalk.net/2025/figshares-oai-pmh-interface-is-broken/