A small change will be made to the XML data serialised for publications in the Elements API v5.5 compatibility endpoint in the upcoming v6.4 release of Elements.

The change is backwards compatible with respect to the API v5.5 endpoint schema, so will not break interoperability based on schema validation.

It does reduce the effective level of detail in a publication data response, but we believe no clients, or very few, will be affected by the change.

This article describes the change, and provides advice on other ways of reaching the removed data should your institution have a dependency on it.

The change is best described by example:

Within a publication XML response, an <api:journal> element can often be found which describes the journal in which the publication appears. A typical example of the journal element is as follows:

<api:journal issn="0002-9920" href="http://localhost:8091/api/journals/35580">
  <api:records>
    <api:record source-name="era-2015">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="doaj">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society.</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="jcr">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="sjr">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="sjr">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="science-metrix">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="era-2010">
      <api:title>American Mathematical Society. Notices</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="snip">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="era-2012">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="era-2018">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="sherpa-romeo">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
    <api:record source-name="sherpa-romeo">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
  </api:records>
</api:journal>

As you can see, it repeats the journal title many times, once for each data source from which metadata has been found for the journal.

After upgrading to v6.4, the above XML will instead look as follows:

<api:journal issn="0002-9920" href="http://localhost:8091/api/journals/35580"
    title="Notices of the American Mathematical Society">
  <api:records>
    <api:record source-name="summary">
      <api:title>Notices of the American Mathematical Society</api:title>
    </api:record>
  </api:records>
</api:journal>

The changes are:

• A new title attribute has been added directly to the journal element

• The records element now contains only one record entry, whose source-name is always "summary".

It is anticipated that a future version of the Elements API will remove the records element entirely. But for now, for the sake of backwards compatibility with the v5.5 schema, it has been kept.

Note that the change does not break the existing v5.5 Elements API endpoint version schema, which is why we do not anticipate this change negatively affecting any clients.

In both the old and new serialisations of the above data, an href attribute links to the full data for the associated journal. You can follow that link to find the full details of the referenced journal object. The data returned by that resource contains all of the title variants previously displayed in this XML.