Pubget President, Ryan Jones, recently authored an entry for the SLA Future Ready Blog’s(very ambitious) program to host a new guest author each day. What’s Pubget’s place in the movement to end content fragmentation and streamline how information and users connect? (Ok, if you’re an avid Pubget user, you might know the answer to that already.) Read on to find out, or click here.

Bridging the Google Gap, with an App

Researchers are turning to free search engines over licensed databases because of familiarity, simplicity and access to free content. By starting there, though, they face a fragmented experience across free and paid resources that’s fraught with dead ends, different formats and broken user interfaces. They also may pass up a perfect resource because it doesn’t crop up on the first page of the many results on Google. These shortcomings make up the Google Gap.

The Google Gap (or PubMed Gap or Science Direct Gap, etc) has been well explored by the library community. Technologies like link resolvers and federated search have cropped up to bridge the gap—with limited success. Link resolvers often mean errors in holdings (subscription collections), confusing resource choices and more dead ends. Meanwhile, federated search solutions connect resources at too high a level to provide a satisfactory experience and ignore holdings, the quality of metadata and the format, and usability of content.

So if link resolvers and federated search won’t do, what can bridge the gap between closed and web-based data? The “what” has to be something with enough computing power to provide a simple experience, yet span the web, free and paid content. It has to be something with a high understanding of all the content types that sit at the end of each search task. The answer, it turns out is not a website or database at all.

It’s an app.

Apps, as you’ve come to experience them on your phone or desktop, host more purpose-built code and processing power than traditional websites (as Chris Anderson wrote in this excellent piece in Wired ). Apps can provide enough intelligence to overcome content fragmentation among the user, the web, and library resources to deliver the simple yet powerful experience users ask for. They connect content destinations in highly customized ways, with intelligence, and can thereby standardize user experience across disparate resources. Apps can perform tasks in the background, fetching resources or content in anticipation of users’ needs. Apps can present a familiar and simple interface to the user.

This extra intelligence benefits the library, too. Apps can provide comprehensive data from both users and platforms, which in turn means better content management and more efficient libraries.

At Pubget, we think more intelligence is needed in the way users, the web, and resources are connected. As Chris Anderson says, “The World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting.” At Pubget, we think there’s an app for that.

Have you heard about PaperStats, our content spend analysis tool? It’s the only tool on the market which provides cost per view level analysis and increases the accuracy of a library’s holdings, saving librarians time and optimizing budget. And now, we’ve partnered with Reprints Desk to distribute PaperStats to enterprise clients. 

Santa Monica, Calif., January 14, 2010– Reprints Desk, Inc. today announced that it has signed a direct agreement with the Pubget, Inc. to serve as the exclusive corporate distributor for Pubget’s PaperStats product. PaperStats is the content spend analytics tool that saves organizations time and money by automating the aggregation, updating, and analysis of journal holdings and content data. Corporate information centers can now analyze usage and spending across subscriptions and document delivery for better collection management decision-making in support of scientific research.

“Reprints Desk is pleased to introduce PaperStats to corporations worldwide and deliver yet another simple solution to a complex and costly information industry challenge,” said Scott Ahlberg, Head of Corporate Services at Reprints Desk. “Usage-based bibliometric analysis is becoming an important part of purchasing decisions.”

Pubget has deployed PaperStats at dozens of organizations worldwide, including University of Southern California (USC) and in libraries at several of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies. PaperStats features include:

• COUNTER-compliant usage reporting across multiple content sources, including data integration from document delivery suppliers such as Reprints Desk
• On-demand cost statistics and spend management recommendations
• Ability to manage publisher admin logins and journal pricing information via an easy-to-use interface

Reprints Desk, ranked number one overall and in every category in the 2008 Document Delivery Best Practices and Vendor Scorecard by analyst and advisory firm Outsell, Inc., is a pioneer of solutions for scientific literature re-use. Pubget, an AlwaysOn East Top 100 award winner, provides full-text search solutions, repositories, text mining, and a full set of APIs for including research on websites or in your enterprise’s applications.

For more information about Reprints Desk and PaperStats for corporations, please visitwww.reprintsdesk.com. For more information about Pubget and PaperStats for academic institutions and government agencies, visit http://corporate.pubget.com/.

About Reprints Desk

Reprints Desk, Inc. helps companies to obtain and use scientific, technical and medical (STM) literature in compliance with copyright and Good Promotional Practices. Services are designed to save time and money, and improve workflows for professionals in information management, research, regulatory affairs, legal, medical affairs, education, sales and marketing. For more information, visit us online atwww.reprintsdesk.com.

About Pubget

Pubget is a search platform for life science PDFs. Pubget’s core product, at pubget.com, solves the problem of full-text document access in life science research. Instead of search results linking to papers, the search results ARE the papers. Once you find the papers you want, you can save, manage and share them—all online. For more info, visitus at http://corporate.pubget.com/.

Hi there, Pubgetters! Here’s a sneak peak at our new big announcement. Pubget is growing, thanks to your help!

January 6, 2010- Cambridge, MA 
Pubget Inc., the search engine for life science PDFs, announced today the activation of its 300th institution. This milestone represents a substantial expansion of the service since its launch at Harvard, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital two years ago.

Activation is the proprietary process that allows Pubget to synchronize with the holdings and authentication system of the institutional library, and is free for universities and non-profit institutions. Once activated, users get instantaneous delivery of over 25 million articles through Pubget.com. “We received an enormous amount of requests in 2010 for institution activations, adding over 100 new institutions this year,” said Dr. Ramy Arnaout, founder of Pubget. “Our goal is to accelerate science, and we’re realizing that goal as more institutions use our service to streamline today’s fragmented research process.”

In addition to institution growth, the volume of researchers searching for papers across these institutions is growing. Pubget now serves over 20,000 researchers each day from these institutions, enterprises and elsewhere. “Researchers who search for papers on Pubget.com are in good company. Pubget is part of the daily lives of researchers at some of the more prestigious academic institutions in the world,” said Arnaout. Within these 300 are 24 of the top 25 NIH Grant Recipient Institutions, as well as 23 of the top 25 US News and World Report Universities.

Not sure if your institution is active?
Go to www.pubget.com and check where is says “use my library subscriptions.” Start typing in the name of your institution. If you see it there, you are already active. If your institution is not active, please request activation.

Not active on Pubget?
Email team [at] pubget.com to start the process. We’ll need to know who you are and what institution you want to activate. Until then, you can search open access content, by typing “access:open” followed by your search terms.