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Application Programmers' Interface

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RoMEO Home | Introduction | Versions & Documentation | Recent Changes | How to use the API | Searching for Journals by Title | Wish List

Introduction

The SHERPA/RoMEO Application Programmers' Interface (API) is a machine-to-machine interface that lets programmers access SHERPA/RoMEO data from their applications. For instance, you could use the API to incorporate an automatic look-up of a journal or publisher into your repository or CRIS deposition process.

We encourage you to play with the API and explore the potential for including it in your own repository and CRIS software. Please send any suggestions and feedback either on the API itself or on the documentation to Peter Millington (romeo@sherpa.ac.uk).

Versions and Documentation

The latest version of the SHERPA/RoMEO API is Version 2.9. We recommend that you work with this version, because it incorporates the improvements from the major upgrade to interactive RoMEO released in August 2011 and susbequent enhancements. It also generates XML output that can be validated against its DTD.

The root URL for Version 2.9 of the API is:

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/api29.php

Full technical details are available in the following documentation download:

Earlier versions 2.4 and above of the SHERPA/RoMEO API will remain operational in the short term, but will be shut down in earl 2013. Any applications using these versions should be upgraded at the earliest opportunity. In most cases, only the root API URL needs to be changed in the application, although you will then need to go on to modify your applications if you wish to exploit the important new features in the latest version.

We strongly recommend that regular and heavy API users register for a free API Key. This allows you to exceed our limit of 500 requests per day and has a number of other benefits.

Recent Changes

Recently implemented changes include:

A full list of changes is given in Appendix D of the documentation.

How to use the API

The basic principle is that an application makes an HTTP request to the API, which returns an XML stream with the search results. The query specification is given in the URL's parameters. The main searches that are available are for journal title, ISSN and publisher's name, although there are also some special searches, such as for RoMEO colours. View the following links in your browser to see examples. The examples use the default XML schema for compatibility with Version 2.4. Add &versions=all to the queries to get data using the new XML schema with separate fields for Publisher's version/PDF

Searching for Journals by Title using the API

Although it would be nice to be able to automate fully the look-up of journal publishers using the API, this may often not be possible, because a query may return zero or many results. Even if a single journal is found, it is advisable to confirm that it is indeed the correct one. We therefore recommend the following general approach to handling journal queries:

  1. Search by journal title, and display the title(s) found
  2. Get the end-user to confirm/select the correct title - even when only a single title is found.
  3. Retrieve and display the publisher's details (if any)

Wish List

Wishes and ideas for the future enhancement of the API have been collated from a survey of SHERPA/RoMEO Application Programmers' Interface (API) users, notes from breakout sessions at the RoMEO API Workshop, Edinburgh, 1st September 2010, and subsequent feedback received from users. We have started updating the wish list, so you are invited to send us further ideas and feedback. View the API Wish List >>

Updated: 05-Oct-2012

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