The importance of Institutional APIs

"We were at the fantastic ‘Open Repositories’ conference last week and as usual it was a great mix of developer chat and bigger picture thinking. Our main focus at the conference was to discuss workflows with existing institutional infrastructure, such as their institutional repository (IR). A number of institutions have spent years developing their IRs to keep them user-friendly and full of open access papers. With recent changes to funder mandates and policies, institutions are faced with the need for systems to better manage all of the other digital products of research. In order to be compliant with the funder mandates, we have been providing IRs for institutions who either do not have an IR at the moment, or feel it is more efficient in terms of time and money to use the ‘figshare for institutions’ set up over massive customizations to repositories like ePrints or DSpace. For the cases where an institution has an existing IR for papers or theses, we want to make sure that all workflows deposit these outputs in the correct place. For this reason, we have been looking at streamlining deposits between systems using our API. API, an abbreviation of application program interface, is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. The API specifies how software components should interact and APIs are used when programming graphical user interface (GUI) components. As well as integrations with other tools used by an institution, such as DuraCloud, we are also using the API to plug into existing storage at a University. Previously, end users as well as other tools have used our free API to make data in figshare discoverable through other systems. This API based system development has several benefits, not limited to interoperability.  Perhaps more important, is the need for APIs for academic reuse. APIs are as essential as persistent identifiers when it comes to research data. A great example of this recently is theSHARE infrastructure, developed by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the Center for Open Science. SHARE is a higher education initiative whose mission is to maximize research impact by making a comprehensive inventory of research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. They have already plugged into several APIs, of which figshare now makes up 13% of the content ..."