Pubget has come up with a solution to a significant problem that the publishing industry and academia should have solved years ago.

If they need to generate income from contectual advertising, we should be pleased that this service has been made available, rather than question the validity of their approach.

If there are copyright issues, I suggest we leave that to the publishers and Pubget to sort out. In any event, no one has actually provided any documentation that Pubget is actually spidering PDF content. I suspect that the search terms, name of journals/articles and user search history may provide adequate content to create good contectual ads without even needing the review the PDF itself.

Much luck to Pubget and I hope they succeed in revolutionizing access to the underutilized scientific literature.

NB I have no relationship with Pubget.com, other than being a dedicated user.

One thing also to note is that Google is currently facing a trademark lawsuit over selling companies’ trademarked names as adwords, so it’s unclear if their approach is wholly legal.

Ok, For search results (Adwords), the ads are actually set against the incoming search terms, not the actual text that can be found in the search results. Now, clearly there is a connection between the search, Google’s spidering of the web and the ability to lay ads alongside snippets of content, but, you can opt out (with robots.txt) and the ads are shown not as a direct result of the text in the search results. I think this is why it has never been challenged (seriously).

Adsense, does use site text for context based adverts, but again, the nature of adsense is such that the responsibility for copyright adherence lies with the person signing up to the adsense scheme.

I’m am speculating of course, but my original comment was based on the idea that PubGet would have to use the journal texts to develop a context based advertising model, and thus, unlike Google they would directly be running up against the copyright restrictions. Also over here at least, copyright extends into databases… where the process of harvesting a database can sometimes also be an issue, regardless of what’s in it.

Most journals allow search engines to spider and index their content, and ads are sold against searches that bring up the content in results. The big difference is that the search engines send traffic to the journals, where PubGet would not.

PubGet want to make money off advertising and the logical approach to do that is to mine the text of the articles in order to be able to place relevant ads next to the research results.

That approach would be in breach of copyright I think, unless they are going to enter into agreements with publishers for a revenue split on the ad income.

I agree with David up at the top – this looks and smells awfully like a hijacking program.

The problem is that professional journals offer more than information; they offer information that has to some degree been assessed for reliability and accuracy. Articles are routinely peer reviewed by independent experts in the field who know the existing literature in the field as well as the principles of scientific research design. They use that information to determine the value of a given paper. As anyone who has published in such journals knows, far more papers are rejected than are accepted, the usual reasons for rejection being that the research design is flawed or the results are trivial. When results are unexpected or contrary to existing information, replications of the findings are often requested from the paper author or from independent sources. Editors will also, in many journals, append editorials or summaries of reviewers’ comments to allow the reader to have a more balanced context in which to evaluate the value of a study. Further, most journals require verification that the study was conducted in an ethically acceptable way. Likewise, journals typically require a statement as to where the funding for the research came from so that readers can consider whether factors such as funding from a pharmaceutical firm might have had an impact on the results. As studies move directly onto the web without such review it will become increasingly impossible for readers to determine the quality of the research, whether it was conducted in an ethical way, and whether it was paid for by individuals with vested interests. There have been numerous disclosures of subversion of the scientific literature by pharmaceutical firms in the recent past, and as the editorial process is reduced and ultimately eliminated we can expect these abuses to increase.

It took many long years to develop the editoral oversight system we have with the published journal. Sadly, I see little being done to transfer this process to the web and think this must become an overriding priority of we are indeed to move all of our scientific reporting to the web. Otherwise, the term “virtual reality” will take on a new and much less favorable meaning as we substitute “virtual truth” for actual fact.

I’ve certainly advocated new online tools for publishers, but frankly have never seen (and probably more importantly, never looked for) research on the reading preferences/habits of representative samples of scientists. If current online platforms were designed with a bias towards increasing traffic (or more benignly to test out new tools), the usage/download patterns from these sites is not a source for clear answers…

It is interesting to consider future radical changes in connectedness in which access to the tools around articles is not centralized at one publisher’s website – and local ‘image copies’ are seamlessly connected to the same features now restricted to online/html versions.

The direct line to the pdf also stops many interesting new ventures like article ratings or commenting systems, as those are done on the html versions of papers, not the static and disconnected pdf.