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"Pubget: ze search engine for ze PDFs from ze life-science journals, yes."
I've said on occasion that the surest way to convert a scientist to a fervent Open Access advocate is to lock them for a week in a place with Internet access but no journal subscriptions. In mathematics and physics, we've got the arXiv, so we can typically get some version of most anything published since the mid-1990s or thereabouts, although it might not be the version of the article which actually survived peer review (and was thus shown "not obviously wrong, not obviously redundant and not obviously boring"). Retrieving papers in the biological world is more exasperating. And, to rub it in, even when you're sitting in a building whose WiFi belongs to an institution which has a subscription to the journal you're trying to read, actually downloading the damn PDF requires clicking through extra hoops. A tool to automate this process is a good idea.
According to Bio-IT World's writeup,
What this means is that when scientists use Pubget to search by author for example, the results are delivered in the form of the full-text PDF, without having to navigate through abstracts or publisher's electronic portals. "The end user sees us in two ways," says Jones. "If they are not associated with a larger institution, we are the most thorough resource for free full-text documents. We not only have everything that's in PubMed Central and the other free resources, but we spider the web for other full-text documents that happen to be out there. If you're at an institution, we're the fastest way to take advantage of the subscriptions your institution has provided for you."Pubget offers various links for functionality, including a Firefox plug-in to download PDFs; access to the publishers' web page and the equivalent page in PubMed; email forwarding; and tagging (using a virtual cloud-based storage system) to metatag articles and keep them in a 'locker.' A widget, which works via RSS, allows continuous updates on topics or authors inside a lab web page.
Try it out and see how well it works, I suppose.
(Via.)
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