Hey there, my name is Bryan Bishop. Here's to trying to keep up with yourself. RSS.
About
Transapient Musings of an S6 Archailect
Metacognitive trivialities over smooth topologies and Julian knots of subgeometric spaces; a.k.a mastermind Singularitarian, node of the Larger Submind and Clone of the Ineffable Original.
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/
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Archives
Mon, 21 Apr 2008
Getting your institution supported
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More and more people have been asking us how to get their institution supported, so we thought we'd explain a bit more.
As you know, Pubget makes it easy for users to retrieve and navigate full-text articles, most commonly in PDF form. Where access to these articles is free, Pubget displays PDFs for free. But where access is restricted by subscription, Pubget displays only abstracts; to display the full text of that material, Pubget must support the subscribing institution.
In general, support is a paid service, with the cost paid not by the end-user but by the subscribing institution. The cost depends on three factors: (1) the size of your institution's subscription holdings, (2) the setup of its bioinformatics infrastructure, and (3) the suite of features your institution is looking for.
Because Pubget's mission is to make search ever quicker, easier, and more powerful, we are also interested in novel pilot projects; these may modify the above paid arrangements.
Finally, we're mindful of the unique requirements of supporting commercial institutions, like pharmaceutical companies, with enterprise-level solutions, and also of supporting institutions in Europe, the Far East, South Asia, and elsewhere (we have experience setting up enterprise-level solutions on four continents).
We've put this info up on the site here (you can also get to it by clicking "Contact" at the top of the page). To find out more, if you're a librarian, administrator, or other executive, please go there and take a moment to tell us a bit about yourself, your institution and its holdings, and what you're looking for, and we'll get back to you soon with more details about how to get Pubget supported at your institution. And thanks again for your interest!
posted at: 18:49 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Can't get a paper? Here's what you do
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Here at Pubget we get feedback every now and again from people who are sure they have access to a paper, but aren't able to see it. For example they'll do a search and one of the results will be a paper from Nature from 2004, and they're sure they have access to that, but instead all they see is (1) an abstract, (2) a cheery page that says to try the little "retry" button on the upper right, (3) a less cheery page from the publisher's website saying there was some kind of error, or, rarely, (4) the dreaded "404 Not Found" message. And they send us feedback asking what to do.
Well, here's what you do.
The first thing to try is the little "retry" button at the upper right. If you click that it'll flash for a second, and then about a second later the page will refresh. Nine times out of ten it'll refresh with your PDF; most of the rest of the time it'll give you back an abstract (read on). Why does this happen? Sometimes there's just no link yet; either the paper was just published, or else came out way back in like 1947. Other times papers get moved from somewhere proprietary to somewhere else (most often an open-access archive), and every so often that throws Pubget for a loop. Usually we realize it and so present to you that cheery page that says to try the retry button, but on those rare occasions that we don't, just know to try the retry button. This almost always fixes things (especially the dreaded "404 Not Found" message).
What if it doesn't fix things? Usually when it doesn't fix things, what you see is the abstract. What that means is Pubget has checked and is pretty sure it doesn't have access to that PDF. Sometimes we're wrong about that. For example, just recently Pubget thought that Harvard didn't have access to a journal called Cell Cycle, when in fact it did. You'll notice that after you try the "retry" button, it changes into a button that says "still a problem?" We've got error checking on our end that usually catches these things, but if there's still a problem, just click the "still a problem?" button and send us a quick note. And here's something important: please remember to include an email address, so we can get back to you! Otherwise, we've got no way of getting back to you to let you know we've fixed the problem (which we can generally do pretty fast).
Which reminds me: whoever-you-are, you'll be glad to know Cell Cycle at Harvard is fixed.
The other thing that can go wrong is there's a bad link somewhere. There are 20 million records out there, and while publishers usually do a pretty amazing job of making sure all the links work, every so often they don't. Sometimes we can provide a workaround, but only if you let us know. So thanks for letting us know!
posted at: 18:49 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Pubget on YouTube
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Funny thing we've noticed about Pubget. You tell people "It's like Pubmed, except you get the PDFs right away." But then some people say, "Sounds nice, but I can already get PDFs right away. I can click really fast." And you're not quite sure what to say to that. It's like it's 100 years ago and you're pitching the idea of using the airplane to cross the Atlantic and someone says, "Sounds nice, but we've already got a really fast boat."
The only thing you can do is show them. And short of them visiting Pubget at www.pubget.com and clicking under where it says "Try it!" we figured the best thing was a movie. And so here we are on YouTube, so you can see what we mean.
The only thing to note is that this was on a computer where the user was already logged in to a supported institution (more on how to get your institution supported in another post), so there's no login prompt, and all the PDFs are available. If you try this search—it was "kirschner mw[au]", in case you can't read it—without institutional access, you still get about half the PDFs, but not, say the ones from Nature. But hopefully this little clip is enough to illustrate the problem, and how Pubget is the solution.
posted at: 18:49 | path: | permanent link to this entry
