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Independent measurements of remote MCP servers. Every observation has a timestamp.

Read-only probes

MCP server · Code & DevOps

org.opennih/opennih

Entity-resolved NIH grant corpus (FY1985-2026) via 14 read-only, provenance-carrying MCP tools.

Checks passed
11 / 22

3 failed · 8 not measured

Median response
693 ms

Median of successful probes over 7 days

30-day uptime
Not measured

Share of countable probes over 30 days, including daily rollups. Auth challenges are excluded.

Discovered tools
14

Tool definitions returned by this server

Independent monitoring

Health & checks

Status history

Responded

The server completed its last measured handshake. This is an observation, not a guarantee.

Last checked
Check summary by test group
Test areaPassedFailedUnmeasured
ConnectionCan a client connect and discover tools?
500
Reliability & speedDoes it respond consistently and quickly?
004
Access & authenticationWhat is required to use this server?
102
Tool qualityAre the tool definitions usable by an agent?
310
Publisher identityCan the publisher be traced to its source?
222

Unmeasured means there is not enough evidence to decide. How these checks work

Inspect individual checks 22 recorded

Core

  • Pass
    Reachable

    Latest probe returned HTTP 200 in 693 ms.

  • Pass
    Valid handshake

    protocolVersion 2025-11-25, serverInfo.name OpenNIH Public Grant Analysis.

  • Pass
    Lists tools

    tools/list returned 14 tools.

  • Pass
    Current protocol

    Negotiated 2025-11-25. The bar is 2025-06-18 or newer.

  • Pass
    HTTPS

    The endpoint URL is https.

Performance

  • Not measured
    Fast (p50)

    Median latency 693 ms over 1 samples in 7 days. The bar is 1000 ms. Need at least 5 samples.

  • Not measured
    Consistent (p95)

    95th percentile 693 ms over 1 samples in 7 days. The bar is 3000 ms. Need at least 20 samples.

  • Not measured
    Reliable (uptime)

    1 of 1 attempts returned a tool list in 30 days (100%). The bar is 99%. Need at least 30 samples.

  • Not measured
    Stable tool list

    Fewer than two successful probes in 30 days, so tool-list stability is not measured.

Access

  • Pass
    Open access

    tools/list succeeded with no credential, and the record declares none.

  • Not measured
    Standard auth

    Auth is not required, so the OAuth metadata check does not apply.

  • Not measured
    Free tier cited

    No publisher quote has been checked.

Tools

  • Pass
    Tools described

    Every tool description is at least 20 characters.

  • Pass
    Valid input schemas

    Every inputSchema is a JSON Schema object.

  • Fail
    Parameters documented

    1 of 54 parameters have a description (2%). The bar is 80%.

  • Pass
    Safety hints

    Every tool sets readOnlyHint or destructiveHint.

Publisher

  • Pass
    Verified namespace

    Listed in the Official MCP Registry.

  • Fail
    Website matches publisher

    The website host does not match the reverse-domain namespace.

  • Fail
    Source repo linked

    No repository URL is on file.

  • Not measured
    Repo owner matches

    This namespace is not an io.github login, so the owner comparison does not apply.

  • Pass
    Recently updated

    Updated 2026-10-14T00:04:05.9942Z, within 180 days.

  • Not measured
    Open-source licence

    No GitHub repository to ask about a licence.

Start using org.opennih/opennih

Connect to this server

Choose your client, copy the configuration, then enable the server in your client’s MCP settings.

Run this command in your terminal, then restart Claude Code.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http org-opennih-opennih https://mcp.opennih.org/mcp

Capabilities

Tools 14

activity_code_distribution

Use this tool when the user asks what KINDS of awards NIH (or one Institute) makes — 'how much goes to R01s vs training grants', 'what share of NCI's portfolio is centers', 'break NIH down by mechanism'. Returns counts and recorded totals per mechanism class (research / career / training / center / contract / intramural / ...) from ranking_core.classify. Scope is whole-NIH or one Institute; per-institution portfolios are served by the institution-profile surface instead. Bounds: fiscal years 1985-2100 with fiscal_year_start <= fiscal_year_end; ic is a free-text filter with no length cap. Not paginated.

Discovered
fetch

Use this tool to retrieve the full record for one NIH grant by its id. Returns {id, title, text, url, metadata} with url set to the public OpenNIH grant page so the client can cite it. This is the citation-record wrapper resolving the canonical row for an id. The record is PROJECT-level, not project-year: when a project number owns several project-year rows the LATEST fiscal year is returned (metadata.matching_rows reports how many rows exist). Bounds: id is REQUIRED and must be a full NIH project number matching ^[A-Z0-9-]{1,24}$ (e.g. 1R01CA123456-01A1); core project numbers and partial numbers do not match. An id that matches no row in the corpus raises an error — a missing grant can also mean it was added to RePORTER after the snapshot cutoff, so it is absent here rather than nonexistent.

Discovered
funding_growth

Use this tool when the user asks about the RATE of change rather than the level — 'is this university's NIH funding growing', 'what's the CAGR since 2015', 'who grew fastest'. Returns year-over-year growth plus a window CAGR for one institution (entity_id, the canonical institution identifier) or all NIH. Both yoy_growth_pct and cagr_pct are PERCENTS (2.5905 means 2.5905%/yr, not 259%); the old fractional `cagr` key is gone. NULL awards are excluded, never padded to $0. meta echoes entity_id + organization so looped calls stay attributable. Bounds: fiscal years 1985-2100 with fiscal_year_start <= fiscal_year_end; entity_id is matched exactly with no length cap. Not paginated.

Discovered
funding_trend

Use this tool to get yearly NIH funding totals and grant counts. Returns a time series for the whole NIH, one Institute/Center, one activity code, or one institution. Use it when the user asks 'how much NIH funding was awarded in FY2020', 'how has NIH's budget changed over time', or 'plot R01 dollars by year'. total_funding spans ALL NIH mechanisms (funding_scope="all_mechanisms") and is therefore 1.5-1.7x larger than research-only ranking totals for the same slice, so the two are not comparable. Rows flag the partial current fiscal year. Bounds: fiscal years 1985-2100 and fiscal_year_start <= fiscal_year_end; ic, activity_code and institution are free-text filters with no length cap (matched as parameterized SQL, never interpolated). Not paginated: the whole requested year range is returned.

Discovered
get_institution_profile

Use this tool when the user asks about one named institution — 'what is Harvard's NIH funding history', 'which PIs does this university fund', 'what mechanisms does it win'. entity_id is the canonical institution identifier (from the institution ranking); grant-search results do NOT carry one. Read-only institution profile: funding history, mechanism mix, top PIs. fiscal_year_start/fiscal_year_end scope EVERY aggregate section — the mechanism-mix, funding-trend AND top-PIs sections all report only that fiscal-year window, and provenance.fiscal_year_window echoes the window actually applied; omit both arguments for all fiscal years. meta.found and profile.organization are deliberately window-independent (they answer existence/identity, so a real entity with no funding in the window stays found with its name). meta.found is always an explicit boolean: false (with profile=null) when the entity_id matches nothing in the corpus, true otherwise — branch on it instead of null-checking funding fields. The funding-trend rows' fiscal_year is int OR null: null means 'fiscal year not reported', never 0, and such a group belongs to no fiscal-year window, so it is absent from every scoped section. Bounds: entity_id 2-256 characters, fiscal years 1985-2100.

Discovered
get_pi_profile

Use this tool when the user asks about one researcher — 'how much NIH funding does Dr. X have', 'list this PI's grants', 'who does she collaborate with'. profile_id is the NIH RePORTER PI identifier carried in grant-search results' pi_profile_id field and is not guessable. Read-only PI profile: grants, collaborators, publications, funding totals; the headline name/institution follow the PI's LATEST grant. A fiscal-year window with no grants returns the profile with total_grants=0, not an error. COUNT SEMANTICS (#762): profile.grant_count counts project-year rows (one per fiscal year a grant was funded), while profile.active_grants counts DISTINCT active awards — core project numbers — whose rows are active, so a continuing award counted across several fiscal years in grant_count counts ONCE in active_grants. fiscal_year_start/fiscal_year_end scope EVERY aggregate section — grants, profile totals AND collaborators all report only that window (issue #342; collaborators previously ignored it and returned the all-time list). COLLABORATOR COVERAGE: the collaborator sidecar covers only SOME fiscal years, so an empty collaborators list can mean 'unknown for these years' rather than 'none'. meta.collaborator_coverage.window_covered distinguishes the two: false = no data for any year in the window, and true with window_fully_covered=false means PARTIAL coverage, with the uncovered years listed in missing_fiscal_years_in_window. fiscal_years_with_collaborator_data lists the years that do have it. PI ROLE (#761): each grant carries pi_role — contact (this person is the row's contact PI) or co_investigator (matched via the corpus multi-PI list, so awards someone else leads still count toward totals); meta.multi_pi_ids_loaded=false means the corpus predates that list and only contact-PI rows can match, and meta.present_only_as_non_contact_pi=true means the id is never a contact PI anywhere (headline name/institution are then empty). SUBPROJECT ROWS (#761): award_amount NULL with subproject_component=true marks a component row of a multi-project award whose dollars are carried by another row of the same project and fiscal year — subproject_note names that amount; NULL WITHOUT the flag means not reported. Bounds: profile_id 1-20 digits (^[0-9]{1,20}$), fiscal years 1985-2100, limit 1-50 (default 20), offset 0-100000.

Discovered
ic_topic_cross

Use this tool when the user asks what ONE NIH Institute funds in a topic — 'what is NCI spending on immunotherapy', 'does NIMH fund psychedelics research', 'compare NIAID and NCI on vaccines' (call it once per Institute), or ic='ALL' for every IC at once. The response states which surface produced the numbers in match_strategy: 'rcdc' (official NIH RCDC categories, FY2008+) or 'text' (project_title match, used when the topic is not an RCDC category or the requested window is below the measured 50% RCDC-density minimum; provenance.rcdc_window_coverage reports the actual density). On the RCDC surface each grant is counted once even when several of its categories match. Bounds: ic and query are BOTH REQUIRED, 2-64 characters each; fiscal years 1985-2100 with fiscal_year_start <= fiscal_year_end. Not paginated.

Discovered
institution_concentration

Use this tool when the user asks how concentrated or unequal NIH funding is across institutions — 'is NIH money concentrated in a few universities', 'what share do the top 5 take', 'has inequality grown since 2000'. Returns gini, hhi, top5_share and the top-5 institutions over the competitive RPG-research scope (NULL awards excluded, never padded to $0). Bounds: fiscal years 1985-2100 with fiscal_year_start <= fiscal_year_end. Optional `ic` narrows the scope to one NIH institute when it is an IC abbreviation such as NCI or NIGMS. Any other string is matched as a NAME FRAGMENT and can span several institutes; `meta.ic_scope.kind` reports `fragment` and how many institutes matched. Omit `ic` for all-NIH. Not paginated.

Discovered
mechanism_mix

Use this tool when the user asks what mix of award types ONE institution wins — 'is this university mostly R01s or centers', 'how much of its NIH money is training', 'compare two schools' portfolios'. entity_id is the canonical institution identifier (from the institution ranking). With entity_id it returns that institution's whole NIH-administered portfolio (all mechanism classes); without it, the system-wide RPG-research breakdown — the two scopes are NOT comparable. Counts are grouped by comparability_group and never summed across classes. Bounds: fiscal years 1985-2100 with fiscal_year_start <= fiscal_year_end; entity_id is matched exactly (padded and unpadded DUNS spellings both resolve) with no length cap. Not paginated.

Discovered
rank_institutions

Use this tool when the user asks which institutions get the most NIH money — 'top NIH-funded universities', 'where does NCI money go', 'rank research hospitals by R01 funding'. Each ranked row also yields its entity_id, the canonical institution identifier. Ranks institutions by competitive RPG-research NIH funding (R01 baseline), excluding intramural/contracts/centers/career/training, de-duplicated on core_project_num; NULL total_funding is not reported, never $0. total_funding here is RPG-research-only and is NOT comparable to the all-mechanism NIH totals served elsewhere. Bounds: limit 1-50 (default 20), offset 0-100000, fiscal years 1985-2100, ic 2-64 chars (NIH abbreviation or code, e.g. NCI or CA), sort_by one of composite | funding_scale | portfolio_breadth | new_grant_activity | avg_award_size.

Discovered
search

Use this tool when a research or connector client needs citation-shaped NIH grant hits for a natural-language query. Returns {"results": [{id, title, text, url}]} where id is the NIH project_num and url is the public OpenNIH grant page. Each record is PROJECT-level, not project-year: ids are unique within a response, and the record always describes the project's CANONICAL row — its latest fiscal year, resolved WITHOUT the query filter, so it is exactly the canonical row for that id. One NIH project number can span many sub-awards with unrelated titles (center grants such as P41/P50/P01 are the common case), so the returned title and snippet may contain none of the query terms — the sibling row that matched the query text is not necessarily the canonical row, and the canonical row is the page the citation opens; a match alone does not establish that a returned grant is about the query. This is the citation-record wrapper: citation-shaped records only — it takes no filters (institution, IC, fiscal year, activity code) and returns no funding totals or provenance. Bounds: query is REQUIRED and matched over grant titles at 2-64 characters (a blank query returns no results instead of the whole corpus); limit 1-50 (default 20) distinct grants per page; offset 0-10000 skips matching project-year rows exactly, so stepping offset by limit walks the full result set page by page — results past the first page are reachable, not invisible. A page is the de-duplicated projection of that row window: one project number owning rows in two windows (multi-component awards emit one row per sub-project) can appear on more than one page, and ids are unique within each response.

Discovered
search_grants

Use this tool when the user asks to find NIH grants — by topic, principal investigator, institution, NIH Institute/Center, activity code, fiscal year, or project number ('what NIH grants exist on CRISPR', 'show me Stanford's R01s in 2022', 'look up 5R01CA036569-02'). This is the primary entry point: results carry pi_profile_id, the NIH RePORTER PI identifier. Read-only bounded search over the entity-resolved NIH ExPORTER/RePORTER corpus; results include mechanism_class, funding_basis and provenance, and a null award_amount means not reported, never zero. pi_name matches either name order ('Michael Platt' = 'PLATT, MICHAEL'; corpus form is LAST, FIRST). Bounds: query/text_search/institution/pi_name 2-64 chars, project_num ^[A-Z0-9-]{1,24}$, activity_code ^[A-Z0-9]{1,5}$, fiscal years 1985-2100, limit 1-50 (default 20), offset 0-100000 (offset>10000 is rate-limited to 12/min — partition by fiscal_year instead). meta.total_funding is the full matching-slice sum, not the returned page. Results are cached for ~1 hour. Counting: one result is one source application-year row, so (project_num, fiscal_year) is NOT unique - a multi-component award (P/U center) emits one row per sub-project, so the same project_num can appear several times in one fiscal year with different PIs and titles. These are distinct NIH application records, not duplicates. Each row carries appl_id, the NIH application id and authoritative row identity - two rows sharing (project_num, fiscal_year) with different appl_id are distinct sub-project applications, and appl_id is the key to de-duplicate on. meta.total counts rows, not grants; meta.unique_project_nums counts distinct project numbers, and meta.distinct_awards (row field core_project_num) counts distinct awards.

Discovered
source_status

Use this tool when the user asks whether the OpenNIH corpus is loaded, which official sidecars are available, or how stale the data might be — and before reporting 'no such grant', since corpus_lag_note explains that a grant added to RePORTER after the snapshot cutoff is absent here, not nonexistent. Read-only status for the deployed NIH project corpus and official sidecars. Takes no parameters; no caller paths or external URLs are accepted.

Discovered
topic_trend

Use this tool when the user asks how a research topic has trended over time — 'is CRISPR funding growing', 'how many p53 grants per year', 'when did NIH start funding long COVID'. Returns yearly project-row counts plus recorded award totals for a title keyword match; multi-word queries AND their words in any order. Bounds: query is REQUIRED, 2-64 characters; fiscal years 1985-2100 with fiscal_year_start <= fiscal_year_end. Not paginated.

Discovered

Recent measurements

Probe history

View status
Latest stored probes. Raw probe rows are kept for 14 days.
CheckedResultResponseTools
Connected693 ms14