LabAlpha · the catalog licence
Your assistant reads the map. We keep it current.
For a year LabAlpha has mapped universities the way a surveyor maps land: every department page, every core-facility page, every faculty roster, the federal award records, the papers, and the links between them. Forty-six universities are mapped. A licence is one key that reads that map — in the assistant your campus already uses, with no software to install.
What the catalog holds
Everything in it comes from public sources: university web pages and public federal records. Each row keeps a link back to where it came from and a mark saying whether anyone has re-checked it lately. As of 12 October 2026: about 18,300 researchers, 10,300 instruments, 4,200 facilities, 66,800 papers, 28,500 federal awards, 1,500 patented technologies, and the partnerships between them.
Capabilities carry a confidence built from corroboration — a paper, an award, a patent or an instrument that backs up what a faculty page says — never a model's opinion. Money is labelled by its basis, because federal award totals, research-expenditure surveys and state figures measure three different things.
How a key is used
In a chat. In Claude, or any assistant that speaks MCP: Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, paste the URL that carries your key, and ask in plain English. Your own assistant writes the questions and we return rows. Nothing on our side reasons on your behalf, which is why there is no usage meter.
In your own tools. A plain web request with the key in the header returns JSON: institutions, units, people, equipment, technologies.
For a capstone professor. Type /capstone with your university and your course's technical area, and your assistant builds a project menu from what the campus actually holds: instruments, faculty, companies with a public tie, recent federal awards, each with its page.
Who on campus holds it
The key is the university's, not a person's. The research office signs and passes it to the people whose week it changes: a dean, the innovation hub, corporate relations, a professor planning a semester.
What it will never show
- Any university's business-development work — signals, threads, drafts, approvals. Yours included.
- Contact details for anyone. A person's row carries their page; the page carries the contact.
- Projections, such as when a school might reach R1, or any ranking of named peers' weaknesses.
- Anything a university has not published.
These are enforced by the database, not by a setting: a question that strays there is answered with permission denied, and that is the product working.
What stays the university's
Whether a student may use an instrument is the department's decision, under the university's policy, in the university's booking system. The licence makes the instrument findable. It does not make it anyone's.
Talk to us
A licence starts with a conversation, not a form. jdr@labalpha.com