OpenURL 1.0 TO Google Scholar Firefox Extension

I've been intrigued by Google Scholar, yet frustrated. Like a horse led to water and want's to drink: Google Scholar leads me to many interesting articles; most of which I cannot access directly. Rather, I must use my university account to log into EBSCO or other article databases, locate the articles there, then download them. Apparently, others have shared my frustrations:

OPENLY ADDS OpenURL 1.0 TO GOOGLE SCHOLAR PLUGIN: "Bloomfield, New Jersey - January 11, 2005 - Openly Informatics, Inc. (http://www.openly.com/) today announced that it had added OpenURL 1.0 support, along with several other user-friendly features, to an Open Source browser plugin extension that adds linking to web pages in the Google Scholar service.

The plug-in software, called 'OpenURL Referrer', works with the Firefox Web Browser (http://www.getfirefox.com/) and was inspired by a 'proof-of-concept' released by Peter Binkley, a librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. Although Google Scholar can very useful for identifying the title, author, and other bibliographic information associated with an article, very often users can't use Google Scholar to access the full text of an article. This is because Google Scholar links to many articles in restricted databases that require a subscription or payment to access the full text.

Users that have installed OpenURL Referrer see added 'OpenURL' links on Google Scholar web pages. These links work with library linking systems to provide access to full-text licensed by libraries. Because OpenURL is standard developed by the scholarly information community with the support of NISO, it works with linking systems developed by many different vendors."

The OpenURL Referrer extension is free and is available under open-source license http://www.openly.com/openurlref/.

I can't wait to give it a try. Stay tuned for a user experience report.

Hat tip to ResourceShelf.