iDigBio vs inspirehep.net

iDigBio is a keyless REST API exposing more than 150 million digitized natural-history specimen records — pressed plants, pinned insects, fossils, and more — contributed by U.S. museums and herbaria under an NSF-funded national digitization effort. Search and summary endpoints return Darwin Core fields (collector, locality, taxonomic name) as JSON, and the same backend powers iDigBio's public specimen-browsing portal.

INSPIRE-HEP is the high-energy physics community's literature database, covering papers, authors, institutions, and citation graphs going back decades. Its REST API returns JSON records for literature, author, and conference searches and is fully keyless, with no registration or rate-limit tier to opt into.