FAIRsharing Data Access

APIs for querying and modifying FAIRsharing records on api.fairsharing.org.

REST

A REST API is available which permits querying, creating and updating records in FAIRsharing. In order to use it an account is required; if you have signed in using a service such as ORCID you'll need to create a password and authenticate to the API via your FAIRsharing username/password.

The terms of use of the REST API can be found here. Currently, documentation is available on the main FAIRsharing site, though we may also add some here at a later date.

GraphQL

This API is currently under development. If you're interested in using it then please contact us for a key.

OAI-PMH

There's an OAI-PMH endpoint available at https://api.fairsharing.org/oai. This is currently a work in progress and further fields may be added to the output later. Here are some example queries: List records:

https://api.fairsharing.org/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dcapi.fairsharing.org

Display a single record:

https://api.fairsharing.org/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:fairsharing_record:2521api.fairsharing.org

Content negotiation and signposting

In addition to the REST API above, it's possible to request information directly from our site in machine-readable format, without using https://api.fairsharing.org. If a request for the headers of a page is made the information will be embeded there showing what links/data formats are available. For example:

curl -X HEAD -I https://fairsharing.org/FAIRsharing.2abjs5

...will return the following links in its header information:

link: <https://doi.org/10.25504/FAIRsharing.2abjs5>; rel="cite-as"
link: <https://fairsharing.org/FAIRsharing.2abjs5>; rel="describedby"; type="application/ld+json"
link: <https://fairsharing.org/FAIRsharing.2abjs5>; rel="describedby"; type="application/json"
link: <https://api.fairsharing.org/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:fairsharing_record:FAIRsharing.2abjs5>; rel="describedby"; type="text/xml"
link: <https://fairsharing.org/FAIRsharing.2abjs5>; rel="describedby"; type="text/turtle; profile="http://www.w3.org/ns/dcat#""

The first of these links shows how to cite the record. The second two describe how to obtain information about the record in either JSON or JSON+LD format. The first of these formats will contain the record's entire metadata field.

To access data in one of these formats the following command can be used:

curl -X GET -H "Accept: application/json" https://fairsharing.org/FAIRsharing.2abjs5 

This feature doesn't offer any means to search or modify records, but could be useful for anyone needing to quickly access machine-readable data from our website's pages.

As with our API, the licence terms for the use of our data are included in the response (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

Additional Information

You can find more out about signposting in this EOSC report:

Wilkinson, M., Sansone, S.-A., Grootveld, M., Dennis, R., Hecker, D., Huber, R., Soiland-Reyes, S., Van de Sompel, H., Czerniak, A., Thurston, M., Lister, A., & Gaignard, A. (2024). Report on FAIR Signposting and its Uptake by the Community. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10490289