The best free API in publishing?

I recently found the GitHub repo public apis. It’s a great resource as it lists many free web APIs organised by subject area. Scanning the sections, I jumped straight to the books section to see the free APIs in the publishing space. I wanted to see if there was anything interesting I could use in my day job. I immediately noticed the absence of the Crossref API, so I read up on the contribution guidelines and submitted a pull request to include Crossref. All automated checks passed and a while later I got a nice message back saying thanks for the contribution!

https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis

Crossref Metadata Search

The Crossref API was the standout API on a recent project when we implemented several API integrations across the publishing and e-learning space. Crossref are a publisher funded organisation and the DOI agency (a system used to identify articles and many other types of item). The search API allows users to search and access metadata across millions of articles and associated metadata, including journals, some books, authors, funding bodies etc. You can submit a search query, filter on the results or access an item via an identifier.

The documentation for the API is good, see here, the developers liked working with it (and praised its design) and I could easily explore what was available and match it back to our requirements, making it one of the best free APIs in publishing. I even submitted some pull requests to update the documentation as it was hosted on GitHub at the time. There is now a Swagger document to make things even better (see Swagger here).

You can read more about my experiences integrating the API in my guest post on the Crossref blog here.

You can experiment and use the search functionality from the API through a UI here.

What’s your best free api in publishing? Please let me know!

Crossref metadata search ui
Crossref metadata search ui

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