inspirehep.net vs USGS Earthquake Hazards Program

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.

The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program's FDSNWS Event Web Service is a keyless REST API for querying the agency's global earthquake catalog by region, time window, magnitude, or depth, returning real-time and historical seismic event data. Requests default to QuakeML XML but can also return GeoJSON, CSV, or KML via a format parameter, and the whole service is free and unauthenticated, run directly by the federal government.