Re: Emacs as a word processor

[Ihor Radchenko]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>   > 5. Auto-retrieving meta-data from URL or DOI
>
> This may be an example of a dangerous practice: communicating over the
> network as a silent subtask of something else the user asks to do.
>
> Or maybe it isn't.  After all, I don't know the details -- I can't
> reach any certain conclusions.  What I am doing is extrapolating to a
> possible danger.  That's my job ;-).  So the next step is to learn
> some more.
>
> Could you please show us concretely what org-ref does in regard
> to this meta-data?  What would the user specify, and what would
> it do in response?

AFAIK, org-ref provides ways to get BiBTeX entry
(author/title/publication year/journal/etc) using digital object
identifier (DOI) [1]. DOI metadata is available through doi.org website,
which is ran by non-profit International DOI Foundation. This is done
when the user explicitly request to retrieve that data and add it to
bibtex file (or insert at point). Internally, the metadata needed to
format BiBTeX entry is retrieved using doi.org http API (via
url-retrieve-synchronously + json-read-from-string).

Further, the user can request to download pdf of the article using the
article DOI. This is also done through doi.org that provides information
about the URL where the article is published. Such URL typically points
to scientific journal website (all of such websites that I am aware of
contain javascript). However, org-ref overcomes the need to open the
publisher websites by providing a way to construct direct link to
download the pdf without a need to open browser. Not all the publishers
are supported, but it is already much better than nothing.

For ISBN, it is actually not supported. Though I thought it is.

Best,
Ihor

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier