Hi, all- I was also unable to get into this article: "Alkali Metals Plus Silica Gel: Powerful Reducing Agents and Convenient Hydrogen Sources." Journal of the American Chemical Society v.127:no.26(July 2005): pp 9338-9339.

When I forwarded the problem to our systems librarians, one of them discovered that the problem seems to be happening with any articles that have DOIs ending with a plus sign.  See below for her commentary.  We pass all our URLs through our proxy server by means of Innovative's WAM table.  Do others out there do the same?  If you do, are you having problems?

We are contacting Innovative to see if it is a problem on the Innovative side.
FWIW.

--Rebecca

Rebecca Kemp
Serials Coordinator Librarian
W.M. Randall Library
UNC Wilmington
601 S. College Rd.
Wilmington, NC 28403
phone (910) 962-7220
fax (910) 962-3078
kempr<at>uncw<dot>edu

>>>>>
From: Wiegand, Laura K.
Sent: Thursday, March 05, 2009 11:24 AM
To: Pfohl, Dan
Cc: Kemp, Rebecca
Subject: Problems passing encoded url through proxy

Here's what I have.Dan - I'll let you pretty this up and pass it onto Innovative.

Links to articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society are created based on the article's DOI number.
If this DOI number ends with a plus sign (+) which several articles in this journal do, the proxied url to that article does not work and we get this message: "ERROR: The requested article is not currently available on this site."
However, when we remove the proxy from the url we are able to successfully access the article.

Here is an example for the article "Alkali Metals Plus Silica Gel: Powerful Reducing Agents and Convenient Hydrogen Sources." Journal of the American Chemical Society v.127:no.26(July 2005) DOI: 10.1021/ja051786+

Our proxied url gives us the error message "The requested article is not currently available on this site" :
 http://0-pubs.acs.org.uncclc.coast.uncwil.edu/doi/pdf/10.1021/ja051786%2B
However, when we remove the proxy from the url:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ja051786%2B
we are able to successfully access the pdf.

Noticed that the url undergoes encoding, changing the DOI number at the very end of the url from "ja051786+" to "ja051786%2B"

A proxied url to an article in the same journal that does not have an encoded character at the end of the url works just fine:
http://0-pubs.acs.org.uncclc.coast.uncwil.edu/doi/pdf/10.1021/jp963145u

This is a problem faced by several other libraries, not just UNCW. The vendor (ACS Publications) claims that this is a problem on the library side, not on their side.

This situation occurs in IE 6, FF 3 and Safari.

We are able to successfully access all other articles in this journal (that do NOT have a + at the end of their DOI/url), so this is not an issue with our subscription,  IP ranges or the configuration of the proxy url. We are able to access the article when the proxy is removed from the url, so the article does in fact exist on the vendors site. It seems to me that it has to do with how the encoding of the url is dealt with by the proxy server.