Why APIs matter in the academic world
Academic research is essential to our society. However, a lot of academia suffer from a sort of publication fatigue. A friend of mine at the university has been feeling down while writing her doctoral thesis, because she feels it will just end up in the library and gather dust.
How can the great research done by my friend and many other researchers have the impact it deserves? As the whole academic world is becoming more computational in all its disciplines, there is a great opportunity to get more credit for research by making all data and metadata available through an API.
A first obvious step to achieve a greater impact is making sure that research is easier to find. When all research is correctly decorated with rich metadata, both humans and computers can explore and discover research a lot more easily. Platforms such as SHARE gather this metadata and make it readily available to be found by anyone.
SHARE is a higher education initiative whose mission is to maximize research impact by making research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. To fulfill this mission SHARE is developing services to gather and freely share information about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle. Making research and scholarship freely and openly available encourages innovation and increases the diversity of innovators.
A second step is to publish all research data through APIs. When the research data becomes available, academics can reuse this data in novel research projects. SHARE also publishes data sources on their website and you can find APIs also on sites such as the University of Berkely or API catalogs such as Programmable Web.
The importance of making data accesible has become crystal clear when the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it would also assess individuals to include the impact of their “products”, not just publications. If a researcher has more citations for a dataset or software, it will be considered as more impactful. This will stimulate the academic system to provide better data.
Finally, researchers have access themselves to more and more data and functionality through the use of APIs. By integrating and combining these APIs, their research will cover a wider range and they will spend less time in getting results. This is an important consideration in an age where more and more data is getting generated thanks to IoT and patient-driven initiatives like 23andme.
The benefits of using APIs are becoming clear in the industry. Academic research can benefit from this trend as well.
Using, publishing and managing APIs should therefore be made easy. At apinf.io we work hard to remove the many obstacles that stand between academic research and impactful innovation.
