New on The Scholarly Kitchen today, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to OA”. The article ends by suggesting that the recent flurry of publicity for Sci-Hub might cause commercial publishers to clamp down in various ways…

“Credentials.”

Possible, yes. Big publishers might decide to sue a few libraries, to make the rest much more careful with database log-on credentials. But I don’t remember seeing much real evidence that this is actually a problem, and I follow the news on such things moderately closely. My vague hunch would be that the big publishers are probably already as tight as they can feasibly be on this. First-year student drop-out rates are substantial, and they are often out for months before things like library log-ons get cancelled. It only takes a few of those truculent students to post their credentials online, and another few issues of a top journal are free. To counter that, are universities really going to ask all students to come in to use The Accredited Access Terminals for essay research? There are not enough computer suites, not enough parking spaces, and very probably not enough deodorant (think of the levels of body odour…) to make that feasible.

“More restricted download counters.”

Maybe, although I read that they’re already fairly tight. Certainly tight enough to restrict ‘excessive’ multiple downloads. Tightening up on credentials and download counters and DRM will likely make more legit users sigh and say: “Ya’know, Sci-Hub would be so much less hassle to use…”

“just eliminate the PDF altogether” …[or].. “only providing an online collection of links”

We’re unlikely to see a new file format. PDF is a security risk nightmare, even after a zillion Adobe patches over a period of decades. Starting from scratch with a new file format would trigger alarm bells among the security services, re: huge risk of an even bigger wholesale loss of U.S. intellectual property to China, via the silent security hacks that it would enable. A new type of portable document container would inevitably be highly insecure for at least five years, and would be strongly exploited by overseas espionage teams.

What about a ridiculous ‘nuclear option’ of just showing text on the screen, and nothing more? Well… anything that can be shown as a page of text on a screen can be copied, no matter how many scripts protect it. Copied into editable text via the likes of MS Office OneNote’s excellent ‘Screen Clipping’ function. And that can be done even via a digital camera macro-shot of a PC screen, provided you have a steady hand and a good pocket camera. Retaining footnotes and fancy formatting and figures could, admittedly, be a problem on that point. But it only takes one obsessed guy. For instance, I hear that most of the early comic-book pirating (to the open digital .CBR format, before most publishers started going digital themselves) was actually down to two or three obsessive comics-scanning guys, a full mailbox and some very overheated automated flatbed scanners. Could big print journals, and society journals that still have a print-run, be subject to the same type of scanning-to-PDF? Or could someone even rig up a home-brew “scan-my-iPad, dude!” scanner, to get text scanned from digital screens that are forced to use view-only locked-down software?

A funded PhD Studentship in Digital Publishing and Reading, in the UK with Bath Spa University and the British Library.

Unlocking the Digital Humanities…

“Talks will take place in Eaton Hall on the Medford Campus of Tufts University and in Paulinum 402 at the University of Leipzig. All talks will be broadcast as Google Hangouts and published on YouTube.”

I can’t help thinking that’s the wrong way around, in this day and age. What if each talk were recorded beforehand and then distributed to ‘speakers’ as podcasts, to listen to on trains and planes on the way to the conference? Then, when they get there, they’d discuss the finer points of the talks that they’ve just heard. It would waste so much less time, be more clearly heard (direct-to-ear via headphones or ear-buds), and leave so much more time for debate and informal networking.

The Society of Indexers has chosen Birmingham (the main city in the Midlands of England) for their 2016 national one-day conference. The Society is mostly for copy-editors, book indexers and proofreaders — rather than for those who are dynamically indexing the Web — but it may interest some readers of this blog. The venue will be The Studio, a modern canal-side venue on the edge of Birmingham city centre, on Tuesday 13th September 2016.