Today I received an email from the university library that as of today, we have to register with the library before we can download academic literature. The reason is that the Consortium Luxembourg wants to track usage statistics to determine the financial contributions from each Consortium member. The university librarians gave two solutions, either to use the university search engine, or to manually change the url to include the proxy information. Neither solution is particularly user friendly, but as luck would have it, the latter gives us the possibility to create a bookmarklet that gives you one-click access.

Using the bookmarklet

• Drag the below text “A-Z Access” to your bookmarks.
  A-Z Access
• Look up a paper that isn’t open access (even though it should be), such as this one of mine: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40501-3_46
• Click the A-Z Access bookmarklet in your bookmarks
• Login to your A-Z.lu online account (once you’re logged in this will be skipped automatically)
• You will be taken to the page where you can download the paper (if A-Z has access to it of course)

Background

The bookmarklet works very simple, it looks at the hostname of the current window and adds the required proxy url bit. Many thanks to Redditor Untgradd who gave the solution to add the proxy after the TLD (the .com bit) rather than at the end of the entire url.

The code:

javascript:void(window.location.hostname=window.location.hostname+'.proxy.bnl.lu')