Research tools for the computational age, run on your own infrastructure

Why Mira

Open, owned, and built for scholarship

For researchers

More material, deeper reading, faster to a draft

• Work through far larger bodies of material than by hand.
• Follow lines of inquiry quickly and surface connections across a whole collection.
• Move from reading to a publishable draft with less friction.
• Keep the evidentiary rigour the field requires — every claim tied to its source.

Two ways to run it

Host it yourself, or let us set it up

The software stays free and open either way. Where a deployment runs on cloud research credits, the cloud project goes in the institution’s own name, so the instance is unambiguously theirs.

Made to fit an institution

A clear answer for every stakeholder

A different kind of research tool

In the service of scholarship

Mira joins the rigorous qualitative and disciplinary traditions of the humanities and social sciences to the reach of computational methods. It keeps universities in their proper role — the place where scholars are trained to read closely, argue well, and weigh evidence — rather than ceding that to consumer products built to sell subscriptions. It is open, auditable, and owned by the institutions and scholars who use it, not enclosed for private return.

Sources & the law

Built to respect your licences

Mira brings in open-access, Creative Commons, and public-domain material directly. For licensed content it works through the researcher’s own authenticated library access, following the researcher’s jurisdiction and the library’s terms, and simply opening the publisher or library page where a direct fetch is not clearly permitted. Every acquisition records how it was obtained. The full account — and how it lines up with copyright and text-and-data-mining law across jurisdictions — is set out in the Terms of Use.

For evaluators

Common questions from institutions

Mira uses the AGPLv3 licence, the same licence as widely-used research software many institutions already run. Questions about a particular use are welcome at [email protected].

1. Mira is free and open source under AGPLv3 — so what is the fee for?

Mira, the software, is free and open source; it lives on GitHub, and no one charges to use it. Mira Methods provides a separate setup service: access to rented compute with Mira already installed and configured, so a user does not have to provision and set up the machines themselves. The fee covers renting and preparing that compute, not the software. Anyone is welcome to run Mira on their own hardware for free instead.

2. Can an institution use Mira?

Yes. Researchers, faculty, staff, students, and members may use Mira freely — locally on their own machines or on infrastructure an institution operates — without owing anything to anyone. Internal use asks nothing in return: no publication, no registration, no notification.

3. Does an institution have to publish its research, library, or drafts?

No. The AGPL applies to Mira itself (the software). It does not reach scholarship: uploaded documents, annotations, search results, drafts, and any research outputs created with Mira belong to those who make them.

4. Can an institution host Mira for its staff, students, or members?

Yes — on its own servers or any cloud it operates. Running an unmodified copy asks nothing beyond leaving the licence notice in place. If the hosted copy is modified, see question 6. Assistance with setup is available at [email protected].

5. Does charging tuition or membership fees change anything?

No. A university whose students pay tuition, or a library whose members pay dues, may run Mira for them on the same terms as anyone else. The only thing the licence asks, and only when a copy is modified, is that the modified version be shared with the project so the whole community benefits.

6. What if an institution modifies Mira?

Modification is allowed without restriction. The licence simply requires that a modified version be shared with the project, which makes it available to the whole Mira community. Write to [email protected] or open a pull request on GitHub.

7. Does an institution have to open-source its other systems?

No.

8. Is there help integrating Mira with existing systems?

Yes. Mira Methods is glad to work alongside an IT team to connect Mira with the systems already in place — catalogues, repositories, sign-on, and the rest — and to manage the licensing and compliance issues that come with the work. Write to [email protected] to start.

9. Can someone take Mira, reskin it, and sell it as their own closed product?

No.