REST API for metadata

Software Support
1

I would like to be able to retrieve meta data of articles (and possibly their PDF URL) via a REST API in OJS. Does such a thing exist?

2

Hi @nschloe,

Have you seen the REST API plugin, posted here?
https://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7969

We don’t maintain that plugin ourselves, so I can’t vouch for its compatibility with current releases, but it should be fairly quick to test and if fixes are required they ought to be small.

Alternately, you might have a look at the OAI interface. It’s well maintained, though not designed to be purely RESTful.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

Thanks @asmecher for your reply!

I’ve indeed seen https://github.com/mcrider/rest, but considering that it only has 4 commits in total, the last one dating more than 3 years back, and an open pull request that’s been sitting there for over a year, I thought that this isn’t the kind of software that I’d invest a lot of trust in.

Alternately, you might have a look at the OAI interface. It’s well maintained, though not designed to be purely RESTful.

Thanks for the hint! What’s the relationship between OAI and OJS?

4

Hi @nschloe,

You can explore the OAI interface for your journal by navigating to http://your-host/path/to/index.php/index/oai. (You’ll get XML if you view the source, but it’s formatted via an XSL to provide easy browsing.)

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

5

I have a similar requirement, and would also be interested in a machine-readable version of the article data and metadata. I also did only find the old REST plugin.

@nschloe Did you try out the REST plugin eventually?

I found here that the OAI response does not differentiate between related articles and support files, so it might does not help me as is.

Is it possible/simple to extend the OAI output (both regarding the standard and the code) to better annotate supplemental material?

If you’d rather have me ask this in a new thread, please let me know. Thanks!

6

Hi @nuest,

FYI, OAI is just a container protocol; it’s required to provide Dublin Core but there are already other formats included with OJS that you can use. The other formats might provide finer-grained metadata; alternately, if you’ve got suggestions for how to improve the OAI DC interface while still remaining within the DC best practices, we’re open to ideas. DC is unfortunately just a fairly coarse way to describe content.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team