New Search Service Ushers in Era of Science 2.0



Boston-based Pubget, Inc. today announced the release of its new biomedical search service, Pubget. "It's like Pubmed, except you get the PDFs right away," said company co-founder Ramy Arnaout. "Pubget takes the clicking and waiting out of web search. So instead of waiting for science, you can be doing it."

Pubget is modeled on Pubmed, the government-sponsored public search engine that is the first stop for most of the world's several million biomedical researchers when they are searching the literature. The site indexes about 20 million records and returns a list of titles, authors, abstracts, and related information in response to a search. Many of these records, including the majority of recent records, also include links to where the full text of the publication can be found online.

But getting from the link to the full text is not easy. "It's a Rube Goldberg mechanism," Arnaout said. "The link on the record takes you to a page on the publisher's site. Unlike more mature fields like mathematics and physics, biomedicine is dominated by a dozen or so large publishing houses, which edit, format, and print research publications and host the publications, in various formats and locations, on their own sites."

From the publisher's page, it's usually another click to get to a 'download' page, and another click from there to get to the PDF itself -- "and that's if you're already logged in," Arnaout said. Access to most publications, especially recent publications, is not free. The user, or some institution to which the user belongs, must purchase a subscription; at major research universities, subscriptions can number in the thousands.

Often it's up to the user to know how to manage subscriptions: which sites to visit first for access, what usernames and passwords to use. "It's click and wait, click and wait," Arnaout said. "Pretty soon you've forgotten what it's supposed to be all about: the science."

Pubget introduces a revolutionary new approach: browse the PDFs directly. "Think of it as being like Pubmed, just without all the clicking," Arnaout said. "You want to see what's new on RNAi [RNA interference Just type 'RNAi' and you get PDFs on RNAi. It's that simple."

This approach offers a significant potential gain in productivity. Based on data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, where Pubmed is based, users spend upwards of a quarter of a billion minutes every year searching for scientific literature. Pubget cuts that time by an order of magnitude or moreequivalent to saving more than a full day of work for each researcher, or to adding thousands of researchers to the work force for pennies on the dollar. "Time spent searching is time that could be spent curing disease," Arnaout said. "Pubget was founded to give that time back."

Science at speed

The ability to get PDF's fast opens up new ways to use the literature. "One of the most important things [to scientists is staying on top of the latest developments," Arnaout said. "Pubget lets you read the latest issue of almost any biomedical journal right away," if the user is at a subscribing institution. "Just type the name of the journal and then '[latest' and you're reading it." The site's home page also has a section called "Hot off the presses" with quick links to major journals like Science, Nature, and Cell, making access to those journals even faster.

Pubget also lets users bookmark favorite papers as "keepers," tag and share them, and send citations to Endnote and other popular citation managers, as well as print and save PDFs. "One of the nice things about Pubget is that it turns PDF management into link management," said Pubget's other co-founder, Ian Connor. "You can get to your library from anywhere. And when you share a paper, you only have to share a link, so there's no possibility of copyright infringement."

And this is an important point, Connor said. "Pubget is not a way to get around copyrights. You can only get to a PDF if you or your institution subscribes to it. There's no cheating. If you don't have access, you get an abstract plus links, but no full text. It's just that if you do have access, Pubget gets the full text for you, right away." This arrangement benefits publishers another way, Connor said. "By making it so easy to search, Pubget drives visits to publishers' sites, letting them better track interest in their holdings," he said. "Researchers get information fast, and publishers stay happy. It's win-win."

To manage access, Pubget is offering institution-level subscriptions to universities, companies, libraries, and other research institutions. "Because it's an entirely hosted solution, there's no software to download, install, or maintain," Connor said. Also, because Pubget is web-based, it works cross-platform, on Macintosh, PC, and Linux.





New Search Service Ushers in Era of Science 2.0