1 minute read.Credential Checking at Crossref
It turns out that one of the things that is really difficult at Crossref is checking whether a set of Crossref credentials has permission to act on a specific DOI prefix. This is the result of many legacy systems storing various mappings in various different software components, from our Content System through to our CRM.
To this end, I wrote a basic application, credcheck, that will allow you to test a Crossref credential against an API.
There are two modes of usage. First, a command-line interface that allows you to run a basic command and get feedback:
     Usage: cli.py [OPTIONS] USERNAME PASSWORD DOI
Second, you can use it as a programmatic library in Python:
     import cred
     credential = cred.Credential(username=username, password=password, doi=doi)
     if not credential.is_authenticated():
     …
     if credential.is_authorised():
     …
The tool splits down authentication (whether the given username and password are valid) and authorisation (whether the valid credentials are usable against a specific DOI/prefix).
For technical information, the way this works is by attempting to run a report on the specific DOI in question and then scraping the response page. We hope, at some future point, that there will be a real API for this, but for now this solves the problem as a bridge.
