COinS translator and PDF download

martineve

Hi,

I was experimenting today with trying to get a book translator to import using an ISBN lookup and hit the problem that the COinS translator will do the lookup, but PDF download is only supported by Dublin Core/Highwire. More here: https://eve.gd/2020/04/10/zotero-and-open-access-books/

I wondered: would it be feasible/would anyone be interested if I modified the COinS translator to optionally and safely look for whether there is a citation_pdf_url tag so that where hybrid metadata is available for single items this can be extracted?

Best wishes,
Martin

adamsmith

Hi Martin!
My initial thought would be that it'd be more productive to move this along: https://github.com/zotero/translators/issues/1092
which would address a whole slew of issues alongside with finding the PDF. That said, the above ticket is stalled, waiting for some dependencies in Zotero to get addressed first.

The other thing I'm wondering about for your specific use case, would be if it'd be possible to make the OA PDF visible to unpaywall and for Zotero to then automatically download it when importing. That would almost certainly already work for journal articles (via the DOI), but I'm not sure what it'd involve for books: does unpaywall not have the data (because it relies on DOIs; could the books get DOIs?) Or does Zotero not query it for books/items without DOIs?

dstillman

All Unpaywall entries are based on DOIs. If the books were in Unpaywall with DOIs, Zotero would download the PDFs.

(I'm doing some work on the async dependencies at the moment to try to get us closer to the Generic translator.)