CiteWire

citewire.org · Openly Useful

Attribution-first MCP infrastructure for news and research discovery.

CiteWire gives agents structured, read-only access to news and research metadata while preserving credit and traffic for the original publisher. It can expose a compatible news platform as typed MCP tools, query optional public provider APIs, or do both in one server.

The Community edition is useful on its own. It includes the MCP core, stdio and HTTP transports, the generic platform adapter, and every provider adapter in this repository under the MIT license. Commercial product direction is additive and focused on managed operations, personalization, workflows, collaboration, retained history, and support. See Product tiers.

What CiteWire is for

• News platform operators can expose a compatible read API through news.list, news.get, news.topics, and news.about.
• Researchers and agent builders can enable only the public news and research providers they want to query.
• Self-hosters can run the same server over stdio, stateless HTTP, or inside a Node serverless function.
• Provider contributors can add a focused adapter without introducing a runtime dependency.

CiteWire is not a full-text ingestion service, crawler, publisher, editorial system, or rights-clearance service. It does not store or republish article bodies. Provider reachability does not replace review of the provider's current terms for your use case.

Quick start

Requirements: Node.js 18 or newer. Community is an ESM-only Node package; it does not provide a CommonJS entry point.

Create citewire.config.json with one provider enabled:

{
  "providers": {
    "openalex": { "enabled": true }
  }
}

Run the server over stdio:

npx -y citewire --config citewire.config.json

stdio is the default transport and is the usual choice when an MCP client launches citewire as a local process.

MCP client configuration

Use an absolute config path because clients do not always launch from the project directory:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "citewire": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "citewire",
        "--config",
        "/absolute/path/to/citewire.config.json"
      ]
    }
  }
}

HTTP transport

Run the stateless HTTP transport on port 8722:

npx -y citewire --config citewire.config.json --http 8722

The local endpoint accepts JSON-RPC over POST /. It does not offer sessions or an event stream.

Two ways to use it

1. Wrap a compatible news platform

Declare a platform with a display name, site URL, and read API base:

{
  "platform": {
    "name": "Example Industry News",
    "siteUrl": "https://news.example",
    "apiBase": "https://news.example/api/v1/news"
  }
}

That configuration exposes four tools:

The required HTTP surface is documented in the platform read-API contract.

2. Enable public provider tools

Provider adapters are included in Community and are disabled by default. A provider becomes active only when its config entry sets enabled to true.

{
  "providers": {
    "gdelt-doc": { "enabled": true },
    "arxiv": { "enabled": true },
    "crossref": {
      "enabled": true,
      "mailto": "operator@example.com"
    }
  }
}

Crossref requires the deployer's own contact email so requests can identify the operator to its polite pool. citewire sends that address only to Crossref in the request mailto parameter and User-Agent. Do not copy the example address.

The current adapters are:

Read Providers before enabling one. That document records the endpoint, documentation, free-access basis, and known courtesy limits for each adapter. The provider's own documentation remains the source of truth.

Configuration behavior

• platform is optional.
• providers is optional.
• A provider omitted from the config remains disabled.
• An empty config is valid and exposes no tools.
• Invalid config fails at startup with the field named in the error.
• tools/list is the authoritative tool list for a running deployment because enabled tools depend on that deployment's config.

A deployment can combine a platform and provider tools:

{
  "platform": {
    "name": "Example Industry News",
    "siteUrl": "https://news.example",
    "apiBase": "https://news.example/api/v1/news"
  },
  "providers": {
    "openalex": { "enabled": true }
  }
}

Optional Community policy foundation

CiteWire can expose a local, read-only foundation for source policy, rights evaluation, and shadow inclusion scoring:

{
  "community": {
    "enabled": true,
    "classifierMode": "shadow",
    "thresholds": {
      "adjacent_min": 0.5,
      "standard_min": 0.6
    }
  }
}

Every bundled source remains disabled by default. This setting performs no network calls, loads no credentials, and cannot publish. Credential-based rights checks accept opaque secret-manager references in memory but never return those references. The classifier is forced to shadow mode and always reports publishable: false until a separately reviewed editorial system and evaluation corpus exist.

Read Source registry and rights for the runtime validation, fail-closed policy, canonical MCP tools and resources, and current limitations.

Design boundaries

• MIT and zero dependency. The package uses Node built-ins and has no runtime or development dependencies.
• Node ESM. Community supports Node.js 18 or newer through ESM. It does not provide CommonJS compatibility or a CommonJS build.
• Read only. The included tools query platform and provider read surfaces.
• Stateless. The Community server has no accounts, sessions, saved searches, or retained history.
• Attribution first. Results preserve source metadata and links supplied by the upstream platform or provider.
• Config driven. A deployer decides which tools are present. Nothing turns itself on.
• Storage free. The core does not retain provider responses or source content.

These boundaries are maintained through the project governance policy.

Ecosystem and product documentation

• Product tiers defines the permanent Community value and the additive commercial boundary.
• Distribution contains the exact registry and catalog checklist. Unperformed submissions are marked PENDING.
• Governance explains decisions, provider stewardship, compatibility, and licensing.
• Providers documents each upstream provider.
• Platform contract defines the compatible news read API.
• Contributing covers setup, tests, provider additions, and pull request expectations.
• Releasing defines package and registry release controls.
• Support, Security, and the Code of Conduct define community operating channels.

Project origin

citewire was shaped through its first deployment for Karaya Group Industry News. The public platform contract is generic and can wrap any compatible read API.

Contributing

Run the test suite with npm test. No install step is required. See CONTRIBUTING.md before proposing a provider or a change to a public contract.

License

Community is MIT licensed. See LICENSE.