OKhub.org is primarily a database of open-licensed metadata (bibliographic data and links) about research documents, organisations, and other materials about international development.

The methods and tools for using OKhub.org content depend of who you are and the skills you have. We have developed some tools and services to provide a number of different points of access.

Anyone can access the content through an Open API (a simple technology that acts as an “access key”). You can then use a range of simple tools that we have developed, or develop your own tools, to present any of the content on your own websites and tailor it to your own audiences and contexts. We aim to develop tools which also “expose” or export content from existing systems to contribute to OKhub.org. We also plan to add OKhub.org content to a Linked Open Data platform, to make the content available on the Semantic Web.

By using content from OKhub.org, you know that you will be getting relevant, timely and well documented research about development. The content is continuously added and updated and, in most cases, once set up, content can automatically flow from OKhub.org to your site or application without you having to spend technical or editorial time to make this happen.

In most cases, research document “full text” files are freely accessible online (although authors/publishers retain the copyright for the documents). The metadata (the bibliographic information about the document) is generally available to be re-used for free under a creative commons license (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License).

OKhub.org contains bibliographic information about research documents, the actual “full text” PDFs are stored online (usually) by the publisher on their own websites or repositories. OKhub.org content simply points to where the document is available online. All research items should contain a field which contains the URL of the location of the “full text” document.

OKhub.org has many thousands of research documents collected from all over the world on a wide range of topics. It is likely that there will be some content that you will find useful. Why not have a look at our Content Explorer, where you can filter and search on all OKhub.org content. This will give you a good idea of the scope of the content that OKhub.org has.

Contributors are adding content to OKhub.org on a regular basis as new research outputs and knowledge products are published and added to the contributors datasets.

All OKhub.org contributors are selected based on their suitability to the project objectives and quality of work, so this shouldn’t be a problem, but if you spot anything that you feel should not be included in OKhub.org, please contact us straight away and we will investigate as soon as possible.

To register for an API key to access Hub content programmatically, then visit our registration page.

Being registered enables OKhub.org to provide you with information on any changes to the API, service and content that might affect your application or website.

The registration process, along with the use of API keys, also allows OKhub.org to protect the service from security risks such as denial of service attacks.

No problem, simply fill in our forgotten password form to reset it.

Before you can do anything with the API you will have to be authorised to use API. First you will have to register for an API key. The system will send you an email with a link you need to follow to validate this registration, and then you need to fill in your profile, including agreeing to the Terms and Conditions that cover usage of the API.

OKhub.org API uses a RESTful style and a resource-oriented architecture. Calls are made via HTTP requests (currently only the GET method is available). Your request URIs should be patterned after the examples in the API Explorer, and you should always include your API key in a query string.

The documentation for the API; calls, methods etc. are available in our API Explorer.

Currently this feature is not available. If you wanted to submit content to OKhub.org, then please contact us.

Initially we are not providing a support forum, but we can be contacted via the Support contact form on this page or any of the other contact forms on this site. You can also submit issues with any of our plugins via our Github page.

We would love to hear that any ideas you have about improving the API. Contact us here.

Documentation of the fields in the API can be found here

In order to balance server loads, we allow users to make a limited number of calls to the OKhub.org API in a given hour and return a subset of the full field list. The API does account-based rate limiting (per API Key).

Usage tiers are as follows:

User	Maximum call rate	Maximum number of items per call
General User	150 calls/hour	2000
Offline Application User	300 calls/hour	2000
Partner	300 calls/hour	2000

If you want to get a higher level of access, please contact us – api@ids.ac.uk

Q: Which sources are included in OKhub.org?

You can filter by sources in our Content Explorer, and a list of our content providers can be found here.

Initially we are not providing a support forum, but we can be contacted via the Support contact form on this page or any of the other contact forms on this site. You can also submit issues with any of our plugins via our Github page.

You can also submit feature requests for any of our plugins via our Github page.

Brilliant! We would love to hear about it. Please contact us with details of your work.

We would love to hear your ideas, so please get in touch. Initially fork the code in Github and document any changes you have made. It would be great to talk to you!

We are currently working on a publicly accessible admin interface for OKhub.org where you would be able to register your organisation as a content providers, submit content and then amend your content in OKhub.org. While we develop this, please contact us here if you have content that you want to contribute.

Rather than prescribe a particular data model, standard or process, we are defining a set of technical minimum requirements for supplying content to OKhub.org. We have taken this approach because we want to maintain a flexible hub model that can handle content from a wide range of sources with a wide range of data quality.

(The minimum requirement will be title (of the item), the metadata URL (the unique URL for the metadata of this item) and URL (location of the item on the internet) if available – in some cases, such as Organisation items, the URL of the organisation would not be required for example)