Notanda (Beta) MCP server

Notanda — Open-Access API Harvester

Notanda is the public product name and PyPI distribution name. The repository, Python import package and CLI keep their established technical names Open-Access-API-Harvester, harvester and harvester.

This repository publishes the reviewed 1.3.1 product-core source. It is not a hosted service and the recommended accompanied beta path remains beta@notanda.io.

A public Installer Preview is available under GitHub Releases solely as a technical pre-release: https://github.com/RudiRegenwurm/Open-Access-API-Harvester/releases/tag/v1.3.0-installer-preview.1 Those installers are unsigned on Windows/Linux and ad-hoc signed on macOS, may trigger SmartScreen/Gatekeeper warnings, and are not the recommended installation path for non-technical users.

A headless, resumable, idempotent CLI pipeline that discovers Open-Access scholarly works through OpenAlex Topics, cross-checks them against Europe PMC, falls back to Unpaywall for OA locations, validates every downloaded artifact, and stores the result as a deterministic flat corpus ready for a downstream pre-ingestion pipeline. Schema 4 additionally retains provider observations, merge decisions and acquisitions in an append-only Evidence Ledger while the established read model remains compatible.

DISCOVERY → NORMALIZATION → DEDUPLICATION → ACQUISITION → VALIDATION → INGESTION → PROVENANCE/REPORTING

It is not a web application, document-management system, search engine, OCR system or LLM application. It is a document harvesting pipeline with persistent state.

Quick start

With Python 3.10 or newer, install the PyPI distribution in a fresh virtual environment:

python -m venv .venv
# Linux/macOS:
source .venv/bin/activate
# Windows PowerShell:
# .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
python -m pip install notanda
harvester --version

For an isolated application install with pipx:

pipx install notanda

For development from a repository checkout:

python3 -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

With the local control center (no command line needed after this)

harvester serve

Opens a local web UI at for harvesting, browsing the corpus, inspecting runs and provenance, verifying integrity, retrying failures and editing settings. Credentials can be entered in its Settings page on first run.

New Harvest offers two search modes. Conventional Search uses the query you type, exactly as typed. Assisted Search turns a plain-language research question into one compact retrieval query you can edit, previews up to ten real discovery results without downloading anything, and only then hands the approved query to the same harvest pipeline. Assisted Search needs a query-advisor credential; Conventional Search does not and is unaffected when the advisor is missing or unavailable.

Experimental local MCP server

The repository also contains an optional local MCP component under mcp/. It exposes two deliberately narrow tools — searchliterature and getevidence — and persists the request, provider observation, exact returned result and SHA-256 manifest under one stable evidence ID. It performs no full-text download or corpus write and opens no network server.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.