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rossmounce

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Show HN: PDFx – Extract Metadata and URLs from PDFs, and Download Referenced PDFs 11 years ago

the DOI issue is as described by "aroch"

Quickscrape is capable of downloading PDFs, given a DOI I think: https://github.com/ContentMine/quickscrape

If publishers listened to their readers we would have had 100% Open Access ten years ago. Traditional academic publishers do not listen and don't care.

Even if I could convince say PLOS to do something about this it wouldn't change much. We need all or the majority of publishers to provide good embedded metadata. Not just an isolated one or two. I don't see a good mechanism for making that happen, sadly.

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Show HN: PDFx – Extract Metadata and URLs from PDFs, and Download Referenced PDFs 11 years ago

Most PDF scientific articles sadly don't have good embedded metadata [0], so this & the DOI issue make this not very useful (at least for the journals I read).

I also would have implemented this with a simpler shell script calling exiftool[1] and pdftotext[2], but hey; fun to have a python-based implementation :)

[0] http://rossmounce.co.uk/2012/12/31/pdf-metadata-why-so-poor/ [1] http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ [2] http://poppler.freedesktop.org/

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