Support
Support
Last updated 2026-08-08
OpenNIH is a free, anonymous public service — the website at opennih.org and the public MCP endpoint at https://mcp.opennih.org/mcp. There are no accounts, so there is no support login: everything below is open to anyone.
How to reach us
The correction and report form is the working contact channel. It needs no account, it reaches the maintainers, and it is the same intake used for data corrections. Choose the surface your issue is about — pick “other” for a bug report, an MCP integration problem, a question about these policies, or anything that is not a specific wrong number. Leave an email in the optional contact field if you want a reply; leave it blank to stay anonymous.
Open the report formChannels we do not yet offer
We would rather tell you what does not exist than publish an address that silently drops your message:
- No email inbox. The opennih.org domain has no mail records configured, so no
@opennih.orgaddress can receive mail. Any such address you see quoted elsewhere does not work; do not send to it. - No public issue tracker yet. The source repository is not public at this time, so there is no issue queue you can file against. This page is updated when that changes.
- No phone, chat, or ticket portal. The project is maintained by a small team and does not staff live support.
What to expect
- Best-effort response, no service-level agreement. Reports are read and triaged by a small maintainer team. There is no guaranteed response time, no guaranteed resolution, and no paid-support tier.
- Corrections are tracked, not silently applied. A submitted report is validated into a tracked review draft and checked against official NIH evidence before any displayed value changes. The process is described on the trust page.
- A reply needs a contact address. The service assigns you no account and has no way to look you up, so if you do not fill in the optional contact field there is no way to write back. (The server does record pseudonymous technical values such as a salted hash of your IP and your MCP session id — see the privacy policy — but none of them is a way to reach you.)
- Do not send sensitive information. Report text is stored in the correction queue; see the privacy policy.
Answer it yourself, faster
Most questions are about where a number came from. These pages answer that without waiting on anyone.
Data coverage
Which fiscal years are loaded, which release each figure came from, and when the corpus was last retrieved. Check here first when a number looks stale or a year looks missing.
Methodology
The exact ranking formula, the RPG-research-only scope, entity resolution, and the documented limitations. Most "why is this number different from RePORTER?" questions are answered here.
Trust & governance
Independence and conflict-of-interest policy, how corrections are tracked and resolved, and what governance is in place versus still pending.
Using the MCP endpoint
The public MCP server is at https://mcp.opennih.org/mcp over streamable HTTP. It is anonymous and needs no API key. Before reporting a problem, two checks resolve most integration issues:
- Call the
source_statustool — it reports which source files are loaded, their coverage, and a snapshot-freshness caveat, which tells you what data you are actually querying. The server version is reported separately, in the MCP initialize handshake your client performs on connect. - An HTTP
429means you hit the per-IP rate limit (120 requests per 60-second window). Back off and retry; see the terms.