We’ve made a change in the REST API that will affect how chapter licenses display: from now on you will only see licenses deposited with the chapter and not those from the corresponding book. In the next few days we will reindex all chapters, so the change will be propagated across all affected records (see Jira for details).
Why did we make this change?
Book chapters are, of course, part of a book. However, the two are often licensed differently. Previously we have displayed both the license of the chapter and the license of the book, but in a way that it wasn’t possible to tell which license applied to which. Based on requests from the community, we decided to make it clearer which license applies where. The REST API will now only displaying chapter-level licenses in chapter metadata records. If you want to find out whether there is another license that applies to the book as a whole, you can check the corresponding book metadata record.
How do I know which book to check?
To find the book, you can check the container-title field in the REST API output. Unfortunately, the JSON record doesn’t contain the book’s DOI. We intend to change that, along with several other things about how books and their chapters are represented in the REST API. There is some history to untangle and it might mean some breaking changes, so we’re going to take our time planning to make sure we get it right.
In the meantime, you can find the book metadata and DOI from our XML API. There are a couple of ways to access it:
- Go to the book record and append ‘.xml’ to the URL, e.g.
fromhttps://api.crossref.org/works/10.30896/0042-4846.2018.21.2.03-08
go tohttps://api.crossref.org/works/10.30896/0042-4846.2018.21.2.03-08.xml
In this case you’ll be redirected to the XML API.
- Go directly to the XML API, e.g.
https://doi.crossref.org/servlet/query?pid=test@domain.com&id=10.55186/25876740_2022_6_1_13&format=unixsd
In the XML, there is a field <book_metadata> which contains a section <doi_data> containing the book DOI.