ResearchBlogging.org News

We’re really impressed by the service over at Pubget. It’s a great search engine that solves one of the niggling problems we’ve all encountered: once you locate a citation, you still have to go find the actual paper. Their service allows users to go directly to the paper itself as soon as they find it. Currently 50 research institutions are using their service, giving them direct access to papers as soon as they are located, as long as their library has online access to the journal. If you’re not associated with one of these institutions, you can still use their public search to find publicly available research.

ResearchBlogging.org will soon be working closely with Pubget to make it easier to access articles you see on our site, and easier to find blog posts about articles you find on their site. You’ll hear more from us about this soon. In the meantime, go check out PubGet.

Here’s more on Pubget from Ryan Jones, one of the site’s founders:

About us: Pubget solves the problem of full-text research document access. As opposed to sites like PubMed® that provide results linking to papers, Pubget’s results ARE the papers. We built Pubget because each year, scientists spend at least a quarter billion minutes searching for biomedical literature online. This is time they could better spend curing disease and building the future.

The Pubget service is free to the scientific community, and we include tools for building site widgets, bulk paper downloading and virtual storage and sharing. As such, we’ve attracted tens of thousands of scientists so far and are doubling in size every month. We’re also now available to work with subscription holdings from Albert Einstein Medical Center to Yale (no ‘Z’ yet!).

Pubget FAQ
Who are these guys? Pubget was founded by experts in bioscience, web development and web search: Ramy, a clinical pathologist at Harvard; Ian, a senior architect from IBM; and Ryan, a former web search exec from Microsoft.

How do you make money? The base Pubget service is free to the scientific community. We make money by providing marketing services to the lab equipment and pharmaceutical industries (ads) and through premium services (coming soon!).

How do you get around copyrights? Pubget is not a way to get around copyrights. In fact, Pubget cannot give a user access to any PDF or other material to which the user does not already have legal access. For example, if the user does not have access to a research article in the journal Nature (either through an individual subscription or through the user’s institution), Pubget will not be able to give that user the PDF. This is because technically, Pubget delivers only links to copyright-restricted content, not the content itself.

How are you affiliated with institutions, what does ‘institution activation’ mean? Pubget is working with librarians at dozens of research institutions around the world — you can see some of our relationships at the top of our homepage. Pubget can synchs with library journal holdings, enabling users to get full access to subscription PDFs through the Pubget service.