conceptio-search

Search 1M+ open-access documents — papers, standards, textbooks, and case law — right from your terminal or your AI agent.

conceptio-search is a CLI and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for the Conceptio Open Knowledge Archive — 1M+ open-access documents from 500+ living sources, indexed daily. Every source is open access or public domain. The CLI authenticates with an API key: sign in once, save the key, search from anywhere.

• For humans — search, export citations in 11 formats (BibTeX, APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, Harvard, RIS, Bluebook, OSCOLA, ISO 690, ANSI Z39), and download PDFs to disk with one command.
• For AI agents — a stdio MCP server with nine tools, so Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenCode, or any MCP client can search, queue batch searches, resolve identifiers (RFC, DOI, arXiv, PMID, PMCID, NIST/FIPS, W3C, US case citation), walk the reference graph, save PDFs into your workspace, and hand a document to Zotero or Obsidian.
• 100% self-contained — talks only to the public HTTPS API. No internal infrastructure; your key lives in ~/.conceptio/config.json.

Install

pip install conceptio-search

Requires Python 3.8+. (Checked, not just claimed: the suite parses every source file at the declared floor's grammar, so the promise cannot rot silently.)

The console script is conceptio; python -m conceptio_cli is the same entry point for a virtualenv that was never activated.

Authenticate (one time)

The CLI needs an API key before it can search:

conceptio auth ckey_live_...

Get the key by signing in at conceptio.app and creating one on your profile (Free, Dev, Pro, or Enterprise). The key is stored in ~/.conceptio/config.json and sent as X-Api-Key with every request. conceptio quota reports your tier at any time. Every command below assumes this step is done — without a key the CLI refuses to run and tells you exactly this.

Quick start

# Search — supports source:/lang:/category: directives
conceptio search "attention is all you need" --limit 5
conceptio search "source:nist zero trust" --license commercial-ok
conceptio search "source:eurlex AI act" --json
conceptio search "meditations marcus aurelius" --markdown   # for Obsidian/Notion
conceptio search "diffusion models" --offset 20            # paginate past the first page
# Multi-query programmatic search — two modes:
conceptio search --batch queries.json --json                # queue 1–50 searches, print the job handle
conceptio search --batch queries.json --wait --json         # queue, then block until done and print results
conceptio search --batch queries.json --wait --timeout 60   # …but never block longer than a minute
conceptio search --batch queries.json --sync --json         # run 1–10 immediately, no queue (one request)
conceptio search-job <job-id> --json                        # poll once; repeat on your own cadence
conceptio search-job <job-id> --wait --json                 # poll until done, then print results

# Resolve a known identifier straight to its document(s)
conceptio resolve "RFC 2119"
conceptio resolve "doi:10.1109/access.2020.2986772"
conceptio resolve "2604.08499"                              # arXiv
conceptio resolve "PMID 41961061"                           # PubMed
conceptio resolve "PMC10601397"                             # PubMed Central
conceptio resolve "NIST FIPS 199"
conceptio resolve "347 U.S. 483"                            # US case citation (Supreme Court)
conceptio resolve "20-5364"                                 # federal docket
conceptio resolve "RFC 2119" --json

# Download the original PDF
conceptio download 297465 -o 

... [View full README on GitHub](https://github.com/0x923041-dotcom/conceptio-cli#readme)