Hi everyone! PKP’s interim Managing Director here, writing today to provide an update on this recent thread concerning the Crossref V1 API outage. I am posting as a new thread Posting here so that more folks see the resolution. You will also want to read the post by Bryan Vickery, Crossref’s Director of Product, here: CrossRef plugin submission failure - #12 by Bryan_Vickery.
The tl;dr:
- The Crossref deposit API used by OJS versions 3.1.1 and below is old and unstable, and may break at any time, and did break for a little while in June.
- If you use OJS 3.1.1 or below and automatically deposit DOIs to Crossref, keep an eye on your deposits, and if they appear to be failing revert to depositing manually. Otherwise please consider upgrading to 3.1.2+ at your earliest convenience.
- OJS 3.1.2+ shouldn’t have been affected by the outage and are using a stable, supported deposit API.
The longer story:
On June 10, the Crossref V1 API stopped working. This resulted in any OJS version 3.1.1 and below being unable to automatically deposit DOIs to Crossref. (OJS 3.1.2 and above use their newer V2 API and were not affected.) Crossref established that this was likely due to a change they made on their server, and reverted it. They believe that the V1 API should now be working, and are seeing deposits indicating as much. This was an accidental outage: they did not intend to retire the V1 API.
However: Crossref will be releasing their newest version of the V2 API on July 13, and this isn’t a minor under-the-hood change - there will be a lot of behind-the-scenes infrastructure updates done to make this change happen. Although the Crossref team expect the V1 API to still be available, Bryan states in his forum post that “The v1 deposit API is deprecated and unsupported - if, during the REST API roll out, the v1 deposit API breaks, we may not be able to fix it.”
If you encounter issues again, please let us know and we will follow up with Crossref and see whether things can be fixed. BUT: please take this as an indication of the status and stability of the V1 API. It is an old API that was mostly only ever used by OJS. It really could break at any time. Our recommendation is to keep an eye on deposits, deposit your content manually if required (this is always an option using the Crossref manual export option in OJS), and upgrade to 3.1.2+ at your earliest convenience.