Universitat de Barcelona Jobs Scraper — PhD, Postdoc & Research

Scrapes currently-open vacancies from Universitat de Barcelona's official public-vacancy board (the UB seu electrònica → Ofertes de feina) — the same board UB itself publishes to.

No API key. No proxy. No AI credits. Just run it.

By default it returns open PhD / predoctoral research contracts. Change one field and it returns postdoc, research, teaching, technical or administrative vacancies instead — or all of them at once.

What you get

One flat JSON record per vacancy:

Field	Meaning
id	UB's own numeric vacancy id — stable across runs
title	Full convocatòria title (UB states the department, funding project and contract type inline)
company	Always "Universitat de Barcelona"
location	Always "Barcelona, Spain"
url	Link to the official vacancy page, where the bases and application form are attached
postedAt	Publication date (YYYY-MM-DD), or null if UB didn't state one
deadline	Always null — see below
snippet	Short description excerpt
source	Always "ub_doctoral"

Why deadline is always null: UB publishes application deadlines only inside the PDF bases attached to each vacancy — never on the listing or the detail page. This Actor never fabricates a date it cannot read, so the field stays null rather than guessing. Open the url for the real deadline.

Input

Field	Default	What it does
keyword	predoctoral	Full-text search against UB's own board. Try postdoctoral, investigador, Física, a project name… Set it to an empty string to get every open UB vacancy.
maxItems	12	Cap on vacancies returned (0 = no limit). Each one is billed as one result.
postedSince	—	Only vacancies published on or after this date.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	false	Incremental mode — see below.
stateName	—	(Advanced) Name the dedupe history so separate schedules stay independent.

Only currently-open vacancies are ever returned — closed and in-progress calls are filtered out by UB server-side, so you never pay for a result you can't apply to.

Scheduled PhD alerts (incremental mode)

Turn on onlyNewSinceLastRun and schedule the Actor. Each run then emits — and bills results for — only the vacancies that appeared since the previous run, so a daily PhD alert costs a handful of results a week instead of re-billing the same 20 postings every day. History is kept in the Actor's key-value store, grouped by keyword + postedSince; the first run returns everything.

Run it from your own code

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")

run = client.actor("nomad-agent/ub-doctoral-scraper").call(run_input={
    "keyword": "predoctoral",   # "" for every open UB vacancy
    "maxItems": 50,
})

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["postedAt"], item["title"], item["url"])

Or a single HTTP call that runs the Actor and returns the items in one response:

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nomad-agent~ub-doctoral-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"keyword": "predoctoral", "maxItems": 50}'

Export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or read it over the Apify API.

Pricing

Pay per event: a small actor-start fee plus a per-vacancy result fee. A typical daily incremental run returns only the new postings, so it usually costs the start fee plus a result or two.

Notes & limits

• Covers Universitat de Barcelona only. For EU-wide academic vacancies, see our EURAXESS and jobs.ac.uk scrapers.
• UB publishes vacancy titles mostly in Catalan (some Spanish/English). keyword matches whatever UB actually wrote, so Catalan terms (predoctoral, investigador, professorat) match best.
• If a run can't reach UB, it still finishes as a succeeded run carrying a single warning row that explains why — it never fails half-way or reports an empty scrape as success.

Found a bug, or want another Spanish university covered? Open an issue on the Actor — and if it works for you, a review helps a lot.

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