JISC

Thursday 23 October 2014

Accessing the ORCID public API

As part of our ongoing investigation into how we can promote ORCID use at Swansea University the Information Services and Systems Web Technology Development Team (Web Team) has been looking a machine to machine communication with the ORCID service.

The Web Team was interested to find out what can be accomplished without becoming a full ORCID member in terms of data harvesting of ORCID information relating to published works. There are 3 specific endpoints available publicly from ORCID (public API) as detailed at http://support.orcid.org/knowledgebase/articles/132271-retrieving-data-with-the-public-api. These are:
Bio/orcid-bioGiven a contributor, return name and affiliation data.
Works/orcid-worksGiven a contributor, return the list of works he has contributed to.
Full/orcid-profileGiven a contributor, return list of works he has contributed to, name and public affiliation data.

We are especially interested in the potential to retrieve information relating to published works and automatically creating associated records in our Research Information System (RIS) so the endpoint '/orcid-works' seemed promising. To get back records from this you need to pass in an ORCID ID so a URL such as http://pub.orcid.org/v1.1/0000-0002-9941-1955/orcid-works should work. By default sending this URL returns an XML record along the lines of:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<orcid-message xmlns="http://www.orcid.org/ns/orcid">
    <message-version>1.1</message-version>
    <orcid-profile type="user">
        <orcid-identifier>
            <uri>http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9941-1955</uri>
            <path>0000-0002-9941-1955</path>
            <host>orcid.org</host>
        </orcid-identifier>
        <orcid-preferences>
            <locale>en</locale>
        </orcid-preferences>
        <orcid-history>
            <creation-method>website</creation-method>
            <submission-date>2014-04-16T08:31:09.491Z</submission-date>
            <last-modified-date>2014-07-08T13:27:31.232Z</last-modified-date>
            <claimed>true</claimed>
        </orcid-history>
        <orcid-activities>
            <orcid-works>
                <orcid-work put-code="12640508">
                    <work-title>
                        <title>Creating an in-house content management system</title>
                    </work-title>
                    <journal-title>VINE</journal-title>
                    <work-citation>
                        <work-citation-type>bibtex</work-citation-type>
                        <citation> @article{Roberts_2002, title={Creating an in-house content management system}, volume={32}, ISSN={0305-5728}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/03055720210473038}, DOI={10.1108/03055720210473038}, number={2}, journal={VINE}, publisher={Emerald}, author={Roberts, Alexander}, year={2002}, pages={30รข€“33}}</citation>
                    </work-citation>
                    <work-type>journal-article</work-type>
                    <publication-date>
                        <year>2002</year>
                    </publication-date>
                    <work-external-identifiers>
                        <work-external-identifier>
                            <work-external-identifier-type>issn</work-external-identifier-type>
                            <work-external-identifier-id>0305-5728</work-external-identifier-id>
                        </work-external-identifier>
                        <work-external-identifier>
                            <work-external-identifier-type>doi</work-external-identifier-type>
                            <work-external-identifier-id>10.1108/03055720210473038</work-external-identifier-id>
                        </work-external-identifier>
                    </work-external-identifiers>
                    <work-contributors>
                        <contributor>
                            <credit-name visibility="public">Alexander Roberts</credit-name>
                            <contributor-attributes>
                                <contributor-role>author</contributor-role>
                            </contributor-attributes>
                        </contributor>
                    </work-contributors>
                    <work-source>
                        <uri>http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3054-1567</uri>
                        <path>0000-0002-3054-1567</path>
                        <host>orcid.org</host>
                    </work-source>
                </orcid-work>
            </orcid-works>
        </orcid-activities>
    </orcid-profile>
</orcid-message>

As detailed  at http://support.orcid.org/knowledgebase/articles/132271-retrieving-data-with-the-public-api HTML and JSON formats are also available for this data. The availability of this API endpoint is very encouraging as a means to consume records which have been made public by ORCID holders and allows us to move forward with our plan to automatically populate our RIS with ORCID information where available. Over the next few months we will work towards this functionality.