@aas, the error message with the server returning an error "1 - " is odd, and yet vaguely familiar. The first value here should be an HTTP status code (and “1” doesn’t make sense). The second value should be a response string, which appears to be empty.
Can you confirm that PHP is able to execute an SSL cURL request to Crossref’s server? For example, you could run:
<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
$ch = curl_init('https://api.crossref.org/works?query=josiah+carberry&sort=published&order=asc');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);
print '[' . $httpcode . ' - ' . strlen($response) . ' chars]'."\n";
?>
I wonder if perhaps your cURL is unable to use SSL, or something similar.