EBSCOhost and ScienceDirect Blocking RSS re-syndication?
A friend who is a medical librarian emailed me. She writes:
“I’ve been setting up local RSS pages with Feedburner [for email distribution] and Feed2JS [for dislaying the content of feeds on Web pages] for our most popular journals, to allow for TOCs.
…
It seems the publishers have gotten wise to this and are not allowing their feeds to be resyndicated. It started with EbscoHost — I noticed their feeds never seemed to refresh themselves (which totally defeats the purpose of having a feed). Now it seems ScienceDirect is also blocking re-syndication. FeedBurner can’t pick up the feeds; Feed2JS gives an error, yet the feed validator says it’s a valid feed. SD is providing it’s own source-code to paste into local web pages, but it takes so long to load the page that it invariably times out = useless.
Just wondering if you’ve heard of this from anyone else…”
I don’t use either one of these, so I haven’t seen this problem. Has anyone else? Please let us know in the comments?
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April 29th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
YES! I’ve been having what I assume is the same or very similar problem. I get the feeds directly from SD or EBSCOhost, then use rssinclude (www.rssinclude.com) to create javascript so that I can add a page in our course management system. The feeds work when I set them up, but yesterday quit working – it looked like they had expired. Today they are magically back but I feel like I can’t count on them. I’d love to hear any solutions or explanations.
April 29th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Hi, David. Have you heard about ticTOCs, a table of contents management site from UK? It may answer part of the RSS question. See more at: http://tinyurl.com/c3d7ss
Creaky
April 30th, 2009 at 5:16 am
We do not have a policy of blocking RSS re-syndication, in fact we support it with a tool (similar to Feed2JS) to create HTML feeds, which is accessible from the RSS feed setup screen itself. I cannot guarantee our feeds will work in all services but this is in principle something we support.
Please always contact the ScienceDirect Helpdesk via the contact form on ScienceDirect if you are experiencing any problems with SD–usually we can help, and we cannot read all blogs to identify these issues! For anyone reading this who is experiencing this issue please contact me directly at my first initial dot my last name @ elsevier.com.
May 4th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
In working with Judson Dunham (above) at Elsevier, they’ve worked out the recent bugs with their RSS feeds timing out, and servers needing to be reset. Things should be working as expected now. Resyndicating feeds should NOT be a problem on ScienceDirect. Thank you for listening and getting the problem fixed, Judson Dunham!
I am also working with EbscoHost to solve the problem with feeds that seem to time-out and don’t refresh.
Thanks, David, for posting my query in the first place.