Making Open Access articles much more visible, automatically

January 25, 2013, [MD]

In April, I wrote about my desire to make OA publications much more visible on my academic wiki, and whenever I cite them. The first challenge was to capture the URL I downloaded the files from (ideally automatically), and then check if it is "truly" OA, and not just available to me because I am using the university network. (Yes, I'd love for all articles to be formally OA, using a CC license etc, but for now, I'm more than happy to see articles available for download to the world!)

Improving the API

So I figured out a way to get the URL from the file metadata, and created a simple API to check if the file was indeed a PDF, and available to the world. I then store this information in the bibtex metadata using the field oa-url and url (the url field is used by other software, but there is no guarantee that it points to a PDF, or that it's OA).

Since then, I've upgraded the API to become much more robust (the new code is slightly longer, but performs much better). It uses curl instead of the built-in functionality in Ruby, because curl seems better at following redirects, etc. It first tries to grab the header to check if it's the correct MIME type. If that fails, it tries to download the whole file, and uses the file command to see if it's a PDF file.

I also created a script that goes through every single already-downloaded file and checks this from the local computer (make sure to execute this outside of a campus network) - I'm running the API on my own server, so I'd preferred not to be spammed with thousands of requests simultaneously.

Showing it off

Once I have this data, how do I represent it? Initially, all it did was add a simple "Downloaded from" in the citation, but I always wanted to "celebrate" the fact that a publication was publicly available. I redesigned the citation header (also hiding some of the internal links that aren't useful to web visitors). Here's how an OA publication looks when you are logged in (BibDesk opens the publication in BibDesk, Skim opens the PDF in Skim, and Sidewiki opens the side-by-side view):

and here is how it looks on the public web:

(

I have not inserted any tracking code, so I have no way of knowing how many people actually click these buttons and download the PDFs, although it would be interesting.)

Of course, it doesn't stop with the actual publication page. One of the goals with Researchr is that you should be able to use a publication's citekey (like scardamalia1999research) anywhere on the wiki, on your blog, or even in authoring a publication, and have the proper citation generated. So if you go to the bibliography, you can immediately see which publications are OA (and download them directly through the icon):

similarly on an author page:

And anywhere on the wiki where you are citing an article, for example this extract from my (very in-progress) draft of a literature review on open courses (blog about the process of writing this literature review):

As with any citation, hovering over the link shows you the full citation:

and clicking on the link brings you to my article page with the full citation, download link, clippings, my high level notes, etc. (For example Couros, 2010). Clicking on the PDF icon directly downloads the PDF to your computer. And here is how the section above looks like in the edit view, as you see all the citations are simply using the citekeys, and you get everything else for free:

Note that this is all dynamic, so if I in the future found an open version of the Fini article mentioned above, and added this metadata to BibDesk, this page would have a PDF icon next to Fini on the next reload (the same with the Fini article page, etc).

This doesn't only work on the wiki; I also created a WordPress plugin which enables me to use the same citekey syntax in my blog, and type for example:

[@couros2010developing] is a very interesting article about open teaching.

And it turns into:

[@couros2010developing] is a very interesting article about open teaching.

Future work

It's very frustrating to see how little useful metadata and open APIs are available. There doesn't seem to be a clear standard for embedding microdata into websites with bibliographic metadata, and some of the standards used. Zotero, which is dependent on publishers making metadata available, talks about RDF, COinS and unAPI, none of which are easy for me to generate (if you have a Ruby or Javascript library which can generate either of the above from BibTex, let me know). I use a hidden tag to expose the BibTeX entry on article pages:

This enables me to do things like automatically grab and import the citation from another user's Researchr wiki into my own BibDesk (and if there is a URL, try to download the PDF and attach it automatically), and if you click on the page number after a PDF clipping, it automatically attempts to download the PDF from the publishers (or repository), and opens it in the PDF browser, on the page specified:

(I made a screencast showing this off).

My point is that this should be much more universal - I wish that every site published machine-readable metadata that let me automatically import it to whatever citation manager I use, together with the PDF (if the PDF is available). I wish the BibTex metadata would contain the URL to download the PDF, and even information of whether a publication is OA or not, what kind of license it has, etc.

But for now, I'm very happy with showcasing all the great OA articles that are linked from my site. Check out my bibliography (or other PhD students with open wikis), read my summaries and ideas, and download the articles yourself! And if you are publishing, make sure you make a version of your article publicly available, so that you can get a nice next to your name!

Stian Håklev Toronto, Canada

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