Universitat de Barcelona Jobs Scraper — PhD, Postdoc & Research

Claude / Codex skill to describe and setup this actor: SKILL.md

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

Published postings follow nomad-agent-job-row-v1. The shared fields carry source identity, title and company, parsed locations, dates, the complete plain-text body when available, source markup when usable, and work type. Unavailable scalar facts are null; no parsed location is []. Source-only facts appear in versioned custom.data only when mapped there. See the Output example section for the exact dataset fields and diagnostic rows.

Deadline policy: UB publishes application deadlines only inside the PDF bases attached to each vacancy — never on the listing or detail HTML. The Actor accepts a date only when PDF text explicitly labels it as the application deadline and returns that excerpt in deadlineEvidence. Otherwise deadline remains null; publication and modification dates are never substituted.

Every run also emits one uncharged RUN-SUMMARY row using schema nomad-agent-source-run-summary-v1. Its status distinguishes a genuinely empty source from complete, partial, or failed document enrichment, and its counters reconcile listings, detail attempts, attachment failures, and complete jobs.

Output example

Every row follows nomad-agent-job-row-v1, the one shape shared by all of this fleet's job Actors. A row carries every field; null means the source did not publish that fact, and locations: [] means no usable location was parsed from the posting. Nothing is guessed.

{
  "schemaVersion": "nomad-agent-job-row-v1",
  "recordType": "posting",
  "source": "ub_doctoral",
  "id": "a1b2c3",
  "url": "https://example.com/ub_doctoral/jobs/a1b2c3",
  "title": "Senior Backend Engineer",
  "company": "Example Company",
  "locations": [
    "Bilbao",
    "Spain"
  ],
  "postedAt": "2026-09-02T00:00:00Z",
  "deadline": "2026-10-15",
  "description": "The complete posting body as plain text, exactly as the source published it — never truncated.",
  "descriptionHtml": null,
  "workType": null,
  "custom": {
    "schemaId": "nomad-agent-job-custom-ub-doctoral-v1",
    "data": {
      "deadlineEvidence": "…"
    }
  }
}

Field	Meaning
schemaVersion	Always "nomad-agent-job-row-v1".
recordType	"posting" for a job, "diagnostic" for a row reporting something about the run itself.
source	Which job source the posting came from, from the collector registry's vocabulary — not the Actor name.
id	Stable identifier for the posting within source.
url	Canonical public URL of the posting on the source site.
title	Job title exactly as the source publishes it, untruncated.
company	Employer name as published.
locations	Places the role is based, most specific first — e.g. ["Bilbao", "Spain"].
postedAt	When the source published the posting, ISO-8601 UTC (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ).
deadline	Closing date for applications as an ISO-8601 calendar date (YYYY-MM-DD).
description	The complete posting body as plain text — never truncated, never summarised.
descriptionHtml	The posting body as the source's own markup, preserving lists, headings and links.
workType	Working arrangement: "remote", "hybrid" or "onsite".
custom	Facts only this source publishes, as {"schemaId", "data"}.

A run also emits diagnostic rows — recordType: "diagnostic" with a warnings array — when it has something to report, such as a source returning nothing. They are never billed and are easy to filter out on recordType.

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.
postedWithin	string	any
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.

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. Your total is the start fee plus the number of vacancies returned.

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 or a populated listing collapses during PDF enrichment, it still finishes as a succeeded run with a failed_enrichment RUN-SUMMARY that explains the loss. A real zero-listing result is reported as empty_source.

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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