Nature token vs Zotero question

gwenc25
Our campus uses tokens to access Nature branded articles. We've noticed a huge uptick in use of tokens and many times it's for the same article over and over, sometime with a pattern of every 2-3 days. This uptick theoretically correlates to increased use of Zotero. Does anyone know if these increases could be related? Is it possible that users are embedding links with token information in Zotero and it's regularly refreshing causing a new token to be used each time?

Note, I'm a librarian, not a tech person so go easy on me if this is a ridiculous question!
  • dstillman
    edited September 3, 2024
    What do you mean by "a pattern of every 2-3 days"? Can you say more about the traffic pattern you're seeing? If you have any sort of technical logs, you can email them to us at support@zotero.org with a link to this thread and we can take a look.

    I'm not familiar with Nature's token-based access. That's this? Can you say more about how this works? Is the token used for loading the article page, or just for viewing the PDF?

    By default, Zotero automatically downloads PDFs that are available on an article page. It wouldn't download the same PDF again for the same person.

    For the article page itself, it should generally save a permalink without any sort of URL token, but you can confirm that yourself by saving from Nature. If a token was saved to the URL field, that would be incorrect and we'd want to fix that. (That still wouldn't result in any sort of repeated automated access to that URL, but there'd at least be some situations where it could be loaded again, including just in citations.)
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