A handy bookmarklet

At RuG we have access to several academic journals. From inside the university network this access is transparent. When outside I must first authenticate through a proxy server. The latter is sometimes inconvenient. For example if I’m at home and find a paper through Google, then in order to access the PDF I should go to the RuG journals list and search again. Although this doesn’t take long it is somewhat inconvenient.

Somewhat more convenient is the following. If the paper is at the URL

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0951-7715/21/6/014/

then I can obtain full access to it by adding .proxy-ub.rug.nl after the hostname. The final URL is

http://www.iop.org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/EJ/abstract/0951-7715/21/6/014/

But what if the browser could help us add the (not easy to remember) .proxy-ub.rug.nl to the URL faster? This is possible with the following Javascript.

orig=document.location.href.toString();
parts=orig.split('/');
parts[2]+='.proxy-ub.rug.nl';
document.location.href=parts.join('/');

For maximum convenience I have installed this as a bookmarklet in Safari 1. Whenever I visit the webpage of a paper, I click on the bookmarklet and the magic phrase is added to the URL. After that I authenticate with the proxy server and I am redirected back to the paper webpage with full access rights. You can do the same by dragging the following link to your bookmarks bar or by saving it to your bookmarks.

Add Proxy


  1. I hope that this works in other browsers but I have not tested it. ↩︎

Konstantinos Efstathiou
Konstantinos Efstathiou
Mathematics Dynamical Systems