Dropping Twitter as an event source

From the end of February this year we will no longer collect Twitter events as part of Event Data. We have not been able to reliably collect events from Twitter and, compared to other sources, it comes at a higher cost both in terms of money and the need for additional maintenance.

Our priorities have changed since we launched Event Data, and social media events are not our current focus. In short, there are better things for us to apply our limited resources to. We plan to keep previously collected tweets available until we are required to delete them under the terms of our agreement with Twitter. We’ll confirm timelines in due course.

We continue to work on technology changes that will enable us to deliver metadata more easily and reliably, and in some cases provide services that the community has requested for several years. Part of this work is a single API endpoint for all relationships we know about for a research object, which will combine Event Data, references, and other Crossref member-deposited relationships (such as links to review reports, preprints, and ORCID iDs). This will result in changes to how Event Data is disseminated, but we’ll provide ample notice for users to migrate when changes happen. We’ll post again here when the relationships API endpoint is available for testing.

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Since 22 February 2023, we no longer have access to the Twitter API to gather events for Twitter. Tweets will be available until the end of February, however we are required to remove all data we have collected from Twitter and will begin to do so in the coming days. As part of this process, it may be necessary to temporarily remove public access to the evidence records collected as part of Event Data. We’ll notify via a reply here about planned outages. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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