Re: eprints and authentication

From: Steve Hitchcock <sh94r_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 18:10:13 +0000

At 17:08 08/11/00 +0000, J Adrian Pickering wrote:
>> but found
>>none in the random selection of the 30 articles I looked in.
>>Acrobat also has mechanisms to lock the article to prevent it from
>>being modified. These mechanisms too did not seem to be used by
>>any of my publishers. Which I found quite surprising,
>>maybe even distressing.
>
>Are we going to standardise on PDF? This is pretty good 'electric paper'
>but we must not think that published work is always on 'paper'. There is NO
>excuse for not locking the document.

Why should a pdf be locked? Getting away from the idea that work is always
on paper says to me that it should not be read-only *at the user end*. The
emerging means of authentication described by Adrian should be an excellent
way forward, but why the need to lock as well?

I ask because for projects such as ours, which involves adding third-party
reference links to pdf documents, locking is not insurmountable but is
against the principle of what we are trying to demonstrate.



Steve Hitchcock
Open Citation (OpCit) Project <http://opcit.eprints.org/>
IAM Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT

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