Why?

Integrating automated DOI creation via the DataCite APIs into your research workflows and services offers significant advantages. It streamlines the process of generating DOIs by eliminating manual entry, saving valuable time and effort. Integration enhances the accuracy and consistency of DOI metadata by enabling automatic retrieval and population of metadata fields. This reduces the risk of human error and ensures that your resources are correctly represented and discoverable. Moreover, automated DOI creation enables scalability, especially when dealing with large volumes of research outputs. Integrating automated DOI creation enhances the interoperability of your services adhering to global standards and best practices.

In addition to the creation of DOIs, DataCite’s APIs enable harvesting of metadata associated with registered DOIs. Integrating this functionality into your workflows, ensures up-to-date and accessible information about research outputs and fosters a more open and interconnected scholarly communication.

What?

Using DataCite’s various APIs to automate DOI creation enables you to optimize your research workflows, enhance metadata quality, scale your operations, ensure interoperability, and adhere to metadata standards, ultimately strengthening the impact and visibility of your research outputs.

DataCite provides three distinct APIs for accessing and managing DOI-related information: the DataCite REST API, GraphQL API, and OAI-PMH API. The REST API offers a versatile and widely adopted approach, the GraphQL API provides fine-grained control and efficiency in metadata retrieval, while the OAI-PMH API fosters interoperability and data sharing within the research community.

How?

The DataCite REST API allows you to retrieve, query, and browse DataCite DOI metadata records. In addition, DataCite Repositories can register DOIs and DataCite Members can manage Repositories and prefixes via the API. 

The GraphQL API is an alternative to the DataCite REST API, and currently only supports queries, but not mutations (create or update actions, e.g. registering a new DOI), or subscriptions.

The DataCite OAI-PMH service exposes metadata stored in the DataCite Metadata Store (MDS) using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

Following our documentation you can integrate our APIs yourself or collaborate with a DataCite Registered Service Provider who provides software that integrates with a DataCite API in order to allow you to register DOIs using your DataCite API credentials. Registered Service Providers meet global standards and follow best practices to ensure that their integrations register DOIs correctly and support the creation of accurate and consistent metadata.