OpenURL and COinS

I've improved the bioGUID OpenURL service, based on my experience with the OpenURL Referrer extension for FireFox. This extension takes COinS links in HTML and inserts a link to an OpenURL resolver. The EDIT scratchpads being developed by Vince Smith and colleagues at the Natural History Museum contain COinS (see the APOL - Abyssal Polychaetes OnLine bibliography, for an example). I installed the OpenURL Referrer extension, but my OpenURL resolver broke. Turned out the the COinS want OpenURL 1.0, whereas I supported the much simpler version 0.1 (Caveat Lector pretty much sums up how I feel about this). Anyway, a quick hack of my code and it now works.



If you add http://bioguid.info/openurl.php as a profile, you can then use my OpenURL resolver (there's even a little button to click on at http://bioguid.info/images/openurl.png). Once installed, scratchpads such as APOL - Abyssal Polychaetes OnLine bibliography now have links to the OpenURL resolver.

Why use bioGUID's service? Well, in addition to supporting papers that have DOIs, I'm adding other sources, as mentioned earlier in this blog, and on iPhylo. Some 9000 freely available full text articles are now available through this service. There's still a lot more to do to this service, such as supporting other identifiers (e.g., PubMed and SICIs).

Thanks to Julius Welby for reminding me about COinS.