Elsevier Developer Portal

Partner Support

Many of Elsevier's customers use non-Elsevier products and services that integrate with our APIs. If your organization provides such products and services, you may become an Elsevier API partner.

Becoming a partner... or not

You don't have to become an Elsevier API partner. After all, anyone can get an APIKey and use the APIs in accordance with our policies, and for most applications this is just fine. Also, oftentimes, there isn't a formal difference between being a partner or not.

Best is to think of being a 'partner' as having an open channel of communication and collaboration with us, in order to serve our mutual customers better. Some examples:

• Application access to our APIs generally requires that the customer has an institutional subscription with Elsevier. By default, our APIs use the customer's known IP ranges to control this access. This doesn't work for all applications, in which case an alternative access control method needs to be used, and support procedures agreed on.
• Some types of applications require API access levels that are not enabled by default to ensure the health of our systems, but that can be made available upon review of your application.
• Some API use cases are not covered by our standard click-through agreement and may need a customized agreement.
• Customers sometimes ask us which applications have integrated with our APIs. We want to be able to tell them about this, and we can do that better if we know more about your applications.

If any of these situations apply to you, then you may want to consider contacting us to become a partner.

Note: External developers that have been hired by one of Elsevier's customers to design and develop their software do not need to become an Elsevier partner.

How to become a partner

i. Accept the agreement, get a key

You may obtain an API key via our Developer's Portal - https://dev.elsevier.com/apikey/create. As part of that process, you will be asked to accept a click-through agreement, with which you agree to adhere to Elsevier's policies for each API use case: https://dev.elsevier.com/use_cases.html.

Most common use cases:

• IR/CRIS/VIVO: https://dev.elsevier.com/ir_cris_vivo.html
• federated search: https://dev.elsevier.com/federated_search.html
• cited-by in Scopus: https://dev.elsevier.com/cited_by_scopus.html

ii. Get in touch

Next, contact us through our Elsevier Research Product APIs Support Center. Send along your APIKey and a brief description of your application in the "Your Question" section of the online form. Tell us which of our documented use case you think your application caters to. If your use case isn't listed, describe it to us. Also, include an estimate of the number mutual customers (shared between Elsevier and your organization) for whom the use case is relevant.

Dependent on your use case, we may ask you to provide a bit more information about your application and customers, and/or request that you sign an additional agreement. After that, we will get you set up for development and discuss any questions / concerns you may have about the rest of the process.

iii. Development

When you created your APIkey, it received default settings (see https://dev.elsevier.com/api_key_settings.html). Also, unless you happen to be an Elsevier customer yourself, your access will be restricted to "non-subscriber's" access. This may not be sufficient for you to complete your development. Therefore, after you have contacted us and have cleared any remaining legalities, we will:

• Modify your API key to suit your use case
• Label your API key with your service name
• Provide you with an 'Institutional Token' https://dev.elsevier.com/tecdoc_api_authentication.html, which will provide you with "subscriber's" access for development purposes. instToken authentication is an alternative to IP address authentication.

iv. Production

Once development and testing has been completed and you're ready to deploy your application to production, you need to ensure that your customers can get access to our APIs through the application. If that access can't be granted based on IP address, your application will likely need to continue to use instTokens, like it did during development (see previous point).

Each customer (which is almost exclusively an institution, not an individual) needs their own instToken. You cannot use the instToken you used for development, for customer access in production; this is because customer entitlements vary from one institution to another and from year to year, depending on their active subscriptions with Elsevier.

Customers can use the Elsevier AdminTool to generate their own instToken and provide it to you. You can find more information about AdminTool here: https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/support/admin-tool

If the customer doesn't have access to AdminTool, the instToken can be requested from a local helpdesk: https://service.elsevier.com/app/contact/supporthub/sciencedirect/. The following information needs to be provided to the helpdesk:

1. The request to generate an instToken for a specific service (that would be the name of your product).
2. The CustomerID for the instToken (Customers have an Elsevier Customer ID that is known to their librarian/administrator).

The request can be submitted by a trusted partner or by the customer. If submitted by the partner, the customer has to be included in the communication with the helpdesk.

The helpdesk will send out the instToken which needs to be configured in the customer's application/module. Once the instToken is configured, this will enable the application, in conjunction with your API key, to extract the agreed upon content through the API for as long as the customer's Elsevier subscription is active.

v. Troubleshooting

The Elsevier Research Product APIs Support Center is the first point of contact for trusted partners.

First line support for the application remains with the organization/partner who developed the application. This first line support will help to identify whether the problem is an application issue or an issue with the APIs. If the issue is an API issue, we request that you provide us with the relevant information needed for us to troubleshoot the problem.

Our goal is to respond within 48-72 hours.

Current partners

Below is a list of current Elsevier API partners. This list is not necessarily exhaustive, as some partners have not decided to be listed on this page. Also, many of our client applications do not have partner status.

The partnering services that require an instToken: