OSTI MCP Server

An MCP server that exposes OSTI.gov's public search API as tools Claude can call directly — so Claude can search and retrieve DOE-sponsored scientific literature (technical reports, journal articles, theses/dissertations, patents, datasets) in the middle of a conversation.

What it does

Two tools:

• search_osti — keyword/author/identifier search over OSTI records, with filters for research organization, sponsoring DOE office, publication date range, product type (journal article, technical report, thesis, patent, dataset), and full-text availability. Returns a total count of all matching records (not just the current page) alongside the page itself; rows is capped at 100 per request.

• get_osti_record — fetch full metadata (abstract, subjects, identifiers, links to citation and full-text pages) for a single record by its OSTI ID.

No API key or authentication is required — this only uses OSTI's public read/search API, not the authenticated ELINK submission API.

Related MCP server: legal_scholarship_mcp

Install

Requires Python 3.10+. Dependencies are declared once in pyproject.toml, so pick whichever environment manager you use:

pip / venv:

git clone https://github.com/jsevarts/mcp-osti.git
cd mcp-osti
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

conda:

git clone https://github.com/jsevarts/mcp-osti.git
cd mcp-osti
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate osti-mcp

Try it out

Sanity-check the server directly:

python osti_mcp_server.py

Or open the MCP Inspector for interactive testing:

mcp dev osti_mcp_server.py

Register with Claude Code / Claude Desktop / Claude Science

Point at the Python interpreter inside whichever environment you created above — e.g. venv/bin/python3 for pip/venv, or the output of conda run -n osti-mcp which python3 for conda.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport stdio osti -- /full/path/to/python3 /full/path/to/osti_mcp_server.py

Claude Desktop / Claude Science (Settings → Developer → Edit Config, add to mcpServers):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "osti": {
      "command": "/full/path/to/python3",
      "args": ["/full/path/to/osti_mcp_server.py"]
    }
  }
}

Restart the app afterward.

Example query

"Search OSTI for recent DOE-funded work on phase-field modeling of grain boundary migration, and pull the full abstract for the most relevant result."

API notes

Verified against the live API, not just the docs page:

• GET /records returns a bare JSON array at the top level (no records wrapper). Pagination metadata (X-Total-Count, Link) comes back in response headers, not the JSON body.

• GET /records/{osti_id} also returns a JSON array (containing zero or one record), not a single object — easy to miss.

• publication_date_start/_end must be sent as MM/DD/YYYY. Sending ISO dates causes an HTTP 500 rather than a clean error. This server accepts ISO YYYY-MM-DD dates from the caller and converts them internally, so Claude can pass normal ISO dates without knowing about this quirk.

• OSTI doesn't publish a documented hard rate limit. It does send an X-Rate-Limit-Remaining header, but it read 0 on every request observed during testing even as requests kept succeeding — it doesn't appear to be reliably actionable, so this server doesn't throttle on it. Keep rows modest and avoid tight request loops.

Testing

pip install -e ".[dev]"   # or: conda env create -f environment.yml && conda activate osti-mcp
python -m pytest tests/

Tests mock requests.get, so they run offline.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.