Welcome to the Springer API portal
Springer is a leading global scientific publisher of books and journals, delivering quality content through innovative information products and services. It publishes close to 500 academic and professional society journals. Springer is part of the publishing group Springer Science+Business Media. In the science, technology and medicine (STM) sector, the group publishes around 2,000 journals and more than 6,500 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in about 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and more than 5,000 employees.
We have created three APIs for developers to access our freely available content:
Springer Metadata API - Provides metadata for over 5 million online documents (e.g. journal articles, book chapters, protocols).
SpringerImages API - Provides images and related text for over 300,000 free images available on SpringerImages.
Springer Open Access API - Provides metadata, full-text content, and images for over 80,000 open access articles from BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals.
Springer APIs provide a variety of different output formats, including XML and JSON.
Springer API Challenge 1.0
In our first API Challenge, which ran from December 1, 2010 to May 31, 2011, we asked developers to offer our content users new ways to find, visualize, and manipulate relevant data drawn from our large and growing content database. Over 900 users registered for access to the APIs. 17 apps were submitted to the Challenge. These were evaluated by an interdisciplinary panel of judges on the following criteria: creativity / originality, user experience / design, and value / benefit. Congratulations to the winners:
1st Prize, $5,000: SpringerQuotes: http://springerquotes.heroku.com
2nd Prize, $2,500: KontentLinks: http://www.kontentlinks.com
3rd Prize, $1,000: JournalSuggest: http://journalsuggest.appspot.com
Springer API Challenge 2.0
For our first Challenge we were very general in what we asked for and got a lot of great ideas. For the Springer API Challenge 2.0 we will be a bit more specific in terms of the solutions we’d like to see, while hopefully still leaving room for a lot of creativity. We’ll have the following goals associated with each of our openly accessible APIs:
Springer Metadata API
Goal: Develop an application that provides a novel search solution based on an analysis of trends in the metadata.
SpringerImages API
Goal: Develop an application that uses image recognition to analyze, compare, or search images.
Springer Open Access API
Goal: Develop an application that uses semantic modeling to interpret characteristics of individual full-text documents and/or to analyze relationships among full-text documents.
Mashups of our APIs with open sourced (and non-copyrighted) data are encouraged.
The Springer API Challenge 2.0 will accept submissions between December 1, 2011 and May 31, 2012. Judging criteria will be relevance to the stated goals and, as in the previous Challenge, creativity / originality, user experience / design, and value / benefit. Prize levels will be:
- 1st Prize - US$ 8,000
- 2nd Prize - US$ 4,000
- 3rd Prize - US$ 2,000
Click here for the official rules for the Springer API Challenge 2.0
To work with the Springer APIs
Just follow the steps below:
Register for a user account.
Apply for an API key.
Browse the documentation.
Join a discussion in the forums.
