I too strongly prefer full-text pdfs, I'd love to know how you ensure this.
I've written to our e-journal subscriptions person at the library explaining their importance and requesting that the library prefer full-text pdf providers when purchasing eJournal subscriptions. Unfortunately this crucial bit of metadata doesn't appear to make its way into library catalogues (or services like openurl lookups) so I find it hard to remember which providers have full-text searchable pdfs while grabbing research papers online. This means I'm often annoyed later finding image PDFs (yes, I'm looking at you JSTOR) in my personal library.
i use acrobat pro 7 to batch convert jstor high quality pdfs to txt pdfs. i just put all of my pdfs that i need converted into one directory and batch convert them to txt pdfs. it takes about an hour per 30 jstor pdfs. none of the jstor pdfs are protected, so this works.
To be clear, I'm referring to online journal providers. If one is printing html or other full-text documents---ie creating one's own PDF records---then it is fairly easy to ensure: It's the default mode in 'printing PDF to disk' on OS X, and I assume that Acrobat has that same capability on windows.
some journal providers protect their pdfs. if they do that, you are not suppose to circumvent their protection. so don't use them. alternatively, you could, and i am not advising this, just ignore the protection in one of the ways suggested on any number of websites. alternatively, you can just refuse to cite protected manuscripts. this has the effect of lowering the citation impact score of those journals and encourages people to not publish there and also encourages editors to change their policy.
Any hints? Are you using OCR to convert the image PDFs? Is that pretty effective? Does it integrate with DEVONthink?
once they are ocr'd in acrobat pro, i then import them into devonthink. acrobat pro is excellent for ocr.
Perhaps we should create a list of full-text PDF providers on a wiki somewhere? Does anyone in the e-journal purchasing world already prefer full-text PDF providers? Or maybe end-user OCR is sufficient?
feel free to create a section on wiki.aoir.org for this.
Thanks, James
yep
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