Docs

API

This page documents v.4.0.0 of the DOAJ API.

Base URL: https://doaj.org/api/

Using this live documentation page

This page contains a list of all routes available via the DOAJ API. It also serves as a live demo page. You can fill in the parameters needed by the API and it will construct and send a request to the live API for you, letting you see all the details you might need for your integration.

Please note that not all fields will be available on all records.

Further information on advanced usage of the routes, and FAQs, are available further down this page.

Authentication information

API keys are usually only available to publishers who submit data to DOAJ. If you think you could benefit from integrating more closely with the API, please contact us. If you already have an account, please log in, click 'My Account' and 'Settings' to see your API key. If you do not see an API key then please contact us

Help and support

We have 3 API groups that you can join for API announcements and discussion:

• an announcement-only group (e.g. we release changes, updates, a new version or we are retiring a version)
• a public discussion group for the public api. A public archive of discussions.
• a private discussion group for the publishers api, for those with API keys.

Full API reference

How-To Guide on Search API

Query string syntax

If you'd like to do more complex queries than simple words or phrases, read https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.4/query-dsl-query-string-query.html#query-string-syntax. The DOAJ database is built on Elasticsearch and knowing more about its query syntax will let you send more advanced queries. (This is not a prerequisite for using the DOAJ API - in the sections below, we provide instructions for the most common use cases.) If you think that what you have achieved with the API would be useful for others to know and would like us to add an example to this documentation, submit it to our API group.

Searching inside a specific field

When you are querying on a specific field you can use the json dot notation used by Elasticsearch, so for example to access the journal title of an article, you could use

bibjson.journal.title:"Journal of Science"

Note that all fields are analysed, which means that the above search does not look for the exact string "Journal of Science". To do that, add ".exact" to any string field (not date or number fields) to match the exact contents:

bibjson.journal.title.exact:"Journal of Science"

Special characters

All forward slash / characters will be automatically escaped for you unless you escape them yourself. This means any forward slashes / will become \/ which ends up encoded as %5C/ in a URL. A"naked" backslash \ is not allowed in a URL. You can search for a DOI by giving the articles endpoint either of the following queries (they will give you the same results):

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00479
doi:10.3389%5C/fpsyg.2013.00479

Short field names

For convenience we also offer shorter field names for you to use when querying. Note that you cannot use the ".exact" notation mentioned above on these substitutions.

The substitutions for journals are as follows:

• title - search within the journal's title
• issn - the journal's issn
• publisher - the journal's publisher (not exact match)
• license - the exact license

In addition, if you have a publisher account with the DOAJ, you may use the field "username" to query for your own publicly available journal records. Usernames are not available in the returned journal records, and no list of usernames is available to the public; you need to know your own username to use this field. You would include "username:myusername" in your search.

The substitutions for articles are as follows:

• title - search within the article title
• doi - the article's doi
• issn - the article's journal's ISSN
• publisher - the article's journal's publisher (not exact match)
• abstract - search within the article abstract

Sorting of results

Each request can take a "sort" url parameter, which can be of the form of one of:

sort=field
sort=field:direction

The field again uses the dot notation.

If specifying the direction, it must be one of "asc" or "desc". If no direction is supplied then "asc" is used.

So for example

sort=bibjson.title
sort=bibjson.title:desc

Note that for fields which may contain multiple values (i.e. arrays), the sort will use the "smallest" value in that field to sort by (depending on the definition of "smallest" for that field type)

The query string - advanced usage

The format of the query part of the URL is that of an Elasticsearch query string, as documented here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.4/query-dsl-query-string-query.html#query-string-syntax. Elasticsearch uses Lucene under the hood.

Some of the Elasticsearch query syntax has been disabled in order to prevent queries which may damage performance. The disabled features are:

1. Wildcard searches. You may not put a * into a query string: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.4/query-dsl-query-string-query.html#_wildcards

2. Regular expression searches. You may not put an expression between two forward slashes /regex/ into a query string: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.4/query-dsl-query-string-query.html#_regular_expressions. This is done both for performance reasons and because of the escaping of forward slashes / described above.

3. Fuzzy Searches. You may not use the ~ notation: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.4/query-dsl-query-string-query.html#_fuzziness

4. Proximity Searches. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.4/query-dsl-query-string-query.html#_proximity_searches

How-To Guide on CRUD API

Creating articles

Documentation for the structure of the JSON documents that you can send to our API is hosted on our Github repository.

If you try to create an article with a DOI or a full-text URL as another one of the articles associated with your account, then the system will detect this as a duplicate. It will overwrite the old article we have with the new data you're supplying via the CRUD Article Create endpoint. It works in the same way as submitting article metadata to DOAJ via XML upload or manual entry with your publisher user account.

Applications - Update Requests

If you wish to submit an application which is intended to provide updated information for an existing Journal you have in DOAJ, then you can submit an Update Request.

An Update Request can be created by sending a new application record via the Application CRUD endpoint, and including the identifier of the Journal it replaces in the "admin.current_journal" field:

    POST /api/applications?api_key=?????

    {
        "admin" : {
            "current_journal" : 1234567890
        },
        "bibjson : { ... }
    }

When you do this, a new application will be created, based on the pre-existing Journal. There are a number of fields that will be ignored when provided during an Update Request, these are:

• Title - bibjson.title
• Alternative Title - bibjson.alternative_title
• Print ISSN - bibjson.identifier type=pissn
• Electronic ISSN - bibjson.identifier type=eissn
• Contact Name - admin.contact.name
• Contact Email - admin.contact.email

If you need to change any of these fields, please contact us.

Once you have created a new Update Request, you can make changes to that via the CRUD endpoint (both Update and Delete) until an administrator at DOAJ picks it up for review. Once it is picked up for review, attempts to update or delete the Update Request will be rejected by the API with a 403 (Forbidden).

API FAQs

Is there an upload limit for uploading articles, or a rate limit?

No, there is no limit set on how many articles you can upload, but we do have a rate limit. See below.

There are two ways to upload articles to DOAJ:

1. One by one via the Article CRUD API. This allows one article at a time but it should be possible to upload 1-2 per second, or more if you have multiple IP addresses sending them at once.
2. In batches using the Article Bulk API (only for authenticated users). There are no limits to how many articles are uploaded in a batch. However, processing happens synchronously so you may encounter a timeout based on how long the articles take to process in our system. The timeout is set very high: our server has 10 minutes to respond before the web server closes the connection. Your client may drop the connection sooner, however. Keep the batch sizes small to help mitigate this. We recommend around 600 kilobytes.

There is a rate limit of two requests per second on all API routes. "Bursts" are permitted, which means up to five requests per user are queued by the system and are fulfilled in turn so long as they average out to two requests per second overall.

When making a POST request, do we need to include any of the fields in the admin hash (e.g. in_doaj or upload_id)?

In applications, only the contact subfield is required in the admin section. The full list is handled in our validation structure.

Should language and country be spelled out or can I use codes?

You can use either but using the correct ISO-3166 two-character code is the most robust route. The incoming data is passed to our get_country_code() function which looks up from that list so a name will also work.

How do you identify ISSNs via POST requests?

To identify the correct ISSN, use "https://doaj.org/api/search/journals/issn:XXXX-XXXX" where XXXX-XXXX is the ISSN of your journals.

Do we need the last_updated or created_date to be included?

No, these fields are generated by the system and will be ignored if included.

Should keywords be comma-separated as a single string (e.g. "foo, bar") or separate strings (e.g. ["foo", "bar"])?

As a list of separate strings.

For the link[:content_type] - what are acceptable values?

We expect one of ["PDF", "HTML", "ePUB", "XML"]

Are start_page and end_page required?

In articles these fields are not required. See this list for required fields in article uploads.

Version History