Last week, Pierre Lindenbaum made the bold move of creating a bookmarklet that would find the author's email in the HTML version of a paper and automatically create an email asking for an offprint (authors are generally happy to send copies of their own papers - at least they don't have to pay the postage any more).
This form will generate a personalised bookmarklet for your own use:
Sample message:
Hello, my name is Bruce Banner, I'm a nuclear physicist working on gamma radiation at Los Alamos.
Your recent paper titled
"A method for finding communities of related genes -- Wilkinson and Huberman 101 (Supplement 1): 5241 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences"
caught my attention today. Would it be possible for you to send a PDF copy of the paper?
Best regards,
Bruce Banner, PhD.
Gamma Radiation Laboratory, Los Alamos
P.S. If you've already deposited this paper in an open access repository I could get it from there, if you have the address.
Comments
All fields are optional, email address will not be shown; no HTML, URLs are automatically hyperlinked.
The sort of tool outlined above is the the sort of service I think OpenURL resolvers should implement besides "get the article". Why not "get the email address"? --Eric Lease Morgan
That would be useful, but unfortunately databases (eg PubMed) don't seem to store author's email addresses (which would also be very useful in identifying them).
Cool bookmarklet. Doesn't work in Safari, though.
The XPath selector won't work in Safari, unfortunately.