API key refactors (minor outages this morning)

[wordslikethis]

Hi, everybody. We did a refactor of how we handle API keys in order to pay back some technical debt. That rolled out this morning. You should see no changes.

There were a few intermittent outages of the API this morning (my apologies). Those should be solved. However, if you notice anything strange relating to API keys over the next few days, please let us know.  

Best,
Jason

[Rainer M. Krug]

Thanks Jadon for the info. 

Is there any way of verifying an api key / email combination? Either via spi call or the website?

Thanks

Rainer

Sent from my iPhone

On 15 Feb 2025, at 13:47, wordslikethis <wordsl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, everybody. We did a refactor of how we handle API keys in order to pay back some technical debt. That rolled out this morning. You should see no changes.

There were a few intermittent outages of the API this morning (my apologies). Those should be solved. However, if you notice anything strange relating to API keys over the next few days, please let us know.  

Best,
Jason

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[Sven Hanssen]

We’ve noticed a spike in failed requests to OpenAlex in our service, starting at 09:30 UTC on February 15. This seems closely related to this change.

When calling the API, we include a `mailto` search parameter, which appears to be causing the error. Removing it resolves the issue.

[Sven Hanssen]

It seems very related to this code change: https://github.com/ourresearch/openalex-api-proxy/commit/de29c23e97d8b40ccd88d118963aa5e31ced5340

[Eric Schares]

Same here. I run an API request every morning and got an error for the first time yesterday (Feb 15). Same error this morning, but removing the mailto: parameter fixed it (thanks Sven!).

Eric

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[wordslikethis]

@Rainer There is not currently a way of verifying an API key. That would be a good feature though. We'll add that to the todo list.

@Sven Thank you very much for your timely bug report, and for sharing the workaround with the list.

I'm happy to report that the mailto bug is now fixed and you can go back to including the mailto parameter in your API calls (which we recommend).

j  

[Eric Jeangirard]

To check if an API key is valid, I suppose one can use this type of call

https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=from_updated_date:2025-02-02T00:22:35.180390&api_key=BLABLA

Response status will be 403 if invalid.

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[Krugs.de]

Thanks - true (I verified that my API key is valid).

But an actual API call which verifies the API key as well as the email to be a valid combination, and which returns TRUE or FALSE would be very useful.

Cheers,

Rainer

---

Rainer M. Krug, PhD (Conservation Ecology, SUN), MSc (Conservation Biology, UCT), Dipl. Phys. (Germany)

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Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies
University of Zürich
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On 17 Feb 2025, at 13:06, Eric Jeangirard <ejean...@gmail.com> wrote:



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