In June, a new service that speeds access to life sciences literature reached a milestone. Called PubGet, it is a service that reduces the number of clicks to the full text of an article, and the milestone was activating the 50th institution using its service. Using its own proprietary “pathing engine”, it links directly to the full text on the publisher’s website. PubGet does this by understanding the link structure for each journal of each publisher and constructing the link to the full-text based on information from the citation. The PubGet service focuses on the life sciences journals indexed in PubMed — hence the play on names: PubMed to PubGet.

How It Works

Link Resolver screen for Christensen article

EBSCOhost screen for Christensen article

Typical View of a PubGet Article Display

The pathing engine is one of three components that make up the service. The other two are a search engine and a personalization feature. The search engine indexes the citation and abstract fields; it is not nearly as sophisticated as the thesauri-driven search engine native to PubMed, but it does the job for cases when you have a known citation. The personalization feature allows you to tie your account on PubGet to an institution, and with that knowledge the PubGet service can know exactly what digital rights your institution has for each journal and can create links to the full-text article that go through your institution’s proxy server. The account system also enables you to have new articles matching your search criteria sent to you and to mark articles in the search results for later bulk downloading (via a Firefox plugin).¹

Thinking About PubGet in a Wider Information Ecosystem

It would be nice if PubGet could be set up as an OpenURL target, and when it receives a request translates it to the direct link to the full-text using its pathing engine. That way I could set up PubGet as the OpenURL resolver in my PubMed account, and the article links in PubMed would automatically go to the full text. I don’t know how this would work as a business model for PubGet, though, because as an OpenURL resolver is this manner, it makes the PubGet website invisible — through a series of browser redirects I’d go from PubMed to PubGet to the publisher site. (If the point is to make money selling advertising for related industries, a configuration that completely by-passes any visible signs of PubGet would cut into that revenue source.)

As I was sharing background on PubGet with Thomas Dowling, a colleague at OhioLINK, he pointed out something I didn’t know about OpenURL: it is within the standard to specify a “service type” in the OpenURL Context Object. Section 5.1 of the NISO standard for OpenURL says a service type is “The resource that defines the type of service (pertaining to the Referent) that is requested.” And there are indeed service types registered as part of the SAP2 Community Profile: abstract, citation, fulltext, holdings, ill, and any. So the recipient of an OpenURL request, using the “fulltext” Service Type, should be able to replicate the proprietary PubGet pathing engine using a standard OpenURL structure. In a brief bit of experimentation, though, I was not able to find an OpenURL resolver that a) knew how to handle a Service Type parameter, and/or b) knew how to honor that parameter by getting directly to the full text. As OpenURL undergoes its 5-year review this year, it might be worthwhile to emphasize this part of the standard with examples and descriptions of best practices so it is more widely adopted.

Other Articles on PubGet

• Got PubMed? Pubget Searches and Delivers Scientific PDFs, Bio-IT World, June 10, 2009, By Kevin Davies
• Recommended Website of the month – Pubget, Information Service based at ScHARR at The University of Sheffield, June 9, 2009
• Pubget — useful, growing resource for anyone interested in research, ResearchBlogging.org news, June 10, 2009, By Dave Munger
• Pubget Speeds Up Science Journal Searches, Provides Marketing Tools, Xconomy, June 23, 2009, By Ryan McBride
• Get PDFs ASAP with Pubget, Bitesize Bio, June 25, 2009, By Carrie Iwema

Footnotes

1. Since the articles are not held within the PubGet service itself, the bulk article downloading function requires a Firefox plugin so that the article requests come from your browser to the publisher’s site.

President George W. Bush signs into law H.R. 2764, the Consolidated Appropriations Act 2008, also known at the omnibus, making appropriations for the Department of State, foreign operations, and related programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008, and for other purposes, after boarding Air Force One Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2007. White House photo by Chris Greenberg

Update 20071227T1147 : Title of the post changed to reflect the certainty of the bill being signed into law. Via Peter Suber’s Open Access News comes word from the Washington Post that President Bush signed the bill yesterday. Congratulations to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and all those involved in making this happen. I’m sure we’ll be following the outcomes and impacts of this law for years to come.

The U.S. House and Senate have agreed on a Consolidated Appropriations Act that includes the NIH mandatory deposit and open access provision discussed on DLTJ previously:

SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

The text is unchanged from the previous version of the bill, which was vetoed by the president last month. According to an article on the front page of today’s Washington Post and an article in the New York Times, the final steps of the bill are consideration by the House of an unrestricted war funds amendment, where passage is likely, followed by an expected signature by the President.

[ Update 20071220T0842 : As anticipated, the bill passed the house. ]

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/12/images/20071226-1_p122607cg-0018-515h.html to http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/12/images/20071226-1_p122607cg-0018-515h.html on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/12/20071226-1.html to http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/12/20071226-1.html on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/26/AR2007122600877.html on January 20th, 2011.