EBSCO and PDF downloading

efilgo
I'm using Zotero 3.0 beta and I've been very impressed with the ability for Zotero to download PDFs when saving citations from EBSCOhost databases.

However, Zotero's ability might actually be TOO good. I downloaded 4 citations from two different journals yesterday from Library & Information Science & Technology Abstracts where the PDF was not available - not even in any other database - our library doesn't have a subscription to either the print or online journal. I had even gone and submitted ILL requests for the articles. However, when I went back into Zotero, all 4 articles had the PDFs attached. I went to check at the publisher's website, just in case my IP address was recognized there as having access to the journals, but nope. They wanted me to pay.

How the heck did that happen? And also, isn't this kind of illegal?
  • ajlyon
    It may be the case that EBSCO doesn't enforce the PDF access control very consistently on its side; I added the PDF download functionality to the translator and made no attempt to get around access control, and was in fact working closely with EBSCO developers to make the translator work nicely.

    If it is indeed the case that we're incidentally downloading items that are available only due to lax access control on EBSCO's side, I'll contact our EBSCO people and try to work out a solution.
  • jack.weinbender
    On the flip side of this, I have NEVER been able to get Zotero to download PDFs automatically--in fact, I've barely been able to get it to scrape the citation data.

    Any clue why that might be?
  • adamsmith
    start a new thread, run through translator troubleshooting first
    http://www.zotero.org/support/troubleshooting_translator_issues
    then post a full URL as well as a search path (database + search term) for an item that isn't working.
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