Crossref DOI Deposit Change Evidence API

Check whether selected deposited metadata for a known DOI changed. Returns titles, publication type, publisher, deposited date parts, declared license URLs and supplied update-to links. Useful for bibliographic QA, citation-export pipelines and known-record metadata monitoring.

One GET api.crossref.org/works/encodedDOI per distinct input; at most5 and at least1 second between source calls. Exact normalized DOI identity is checked. Metadata is supplied by depositors and can be incomplete, stale or incorrect. Crossref publication/date parts remain arrays rather than invented calendar dates. licenseDeclarations are records, not a determination that the paper can be reused; update-to links are not a comprehensive retraction check. No paper/abstract/reference-list download, author/ORCID extraction, citation impact inference, search corpus census or license/research advice. At most30 license and30 update records; exceeding a cap makes complete=false. Literal title text may contain markup; consumers must treat it as data and escape it in HTML. A404 is a source error, not proof a work never existed.

Quick start

{"dois": ["10.1038/nphys1170", "10.1126/science.169.3946.635"]}

Pricing and budget

0.001 USD per emitted DOI observation (1 USD per1000), plus0.005 USD startup at default256MB. Higher memory can multiply startup events; check effective Store pricing. Failed/empty sources do not emit result charges; startup can still apply. At zero result budget, input validation occurs but no upstream request is sent, and rowsAvailable is null (unknown). A positive budget can request the bounded source set before output; emission stops at the result cap and complete=false/PARTIAL_BUDGET reports truncation.

Snapshot, integration and limits

Use dataset rows together with OUTPUT and SNAPSHOT. Pass SNAPSHOT.previousHashes as previousHashes in a later run. NO_BASELINE/FIRST_SEEN/UNCHANGED/CHANGED compare only selected metadata including itemKey and sourceUrl; missing records are not deletions. FIRST_SEEN means absent from the supplied baseline. There is no persistent hidden state or automatic polling. Export JSON/CSV/Excel through the default dataset.

API example: POST https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/soilair~crossref-doi-deposit-change-evidence-api/runs with your Apify Authorization header and the JSON input above. Poll the returned run; read dataset items and OUTPUT/SNAPSHOT records using its store IDs. Do not place tokens or confidential data in input. No upstream key is needed. Results live in Apify run storage according to retention; no separate analytics service.

Only fixed HTTPS provider endpoints are constructed from validated identifiers. Public-IP DNS validation, pinned connections, TLS hostname verification,2MiB decoded responses, approximately95 seconds of network budget, at most5 same-provider redirects. Official API calls are distinct from website crawling; no arbitrary URLs or HTML pages. No linked documents/files are fetched. Queries are sequential with1-second spacing. Provider403/429 or Retry-After stops later calls; retry instructions are reported and no retry/proxy/circumvention is attempted. Shared IP limits and changes to upstream services can still block runs. Caller must respect provider headers and cache/reduce repeated requests. Text is data and should not be executed.

Developed with AI assistance. Tests and live/cloud comparisons qualify the selected-field contract; they do not prove commercial demand, provider uptime or a legal/license determination. Support: share a run ID and expected fields, without credentials or private material.

References: https://www.crossref.org/documentation/retrieve-metadata/rest-api/ · https://api.crossref.org/swagger-ui/index.html