Does the browser viewer use the new W3C DRM extensions?
Nature makes all articles free to view
71–80 of 134 posts
Re: Nature makes all articles free to view
#72Does the in-browser viewer use the new W3C-blessed DRM extensions?
Re: Nature makes all articles free to view
#73" Nature's internal costs of publishing run at £20,000–30,000 (US$31,000–47,000) per paper, an extremely high charge to load onto authors or funders rather than spread over subscribers." What in the digital world would make it so expensive to publish content ?
Waste and incompetence unchecked by competetion or regulation.
Re: Nature makes all articles free to view
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like the NFL without paying the players or coaches.
So if you want to get rich and you chose academia as your field, I have bad news for you. I like to think that people write and review papers because they care about their field and its future. I could be wrong.
Ah, the love of the game.
Re: Nature makes all articles free to view
#75Incorrect title. "Nature places all article in flakey peephole viewer."
My thoughts exactly. I was incredibly excited until I read the first line or so. One day perhaps.
"One day" will come when free and open-for-everyone platforms will occupy that domain, not when "Nature" or some other sly organization will do that. Like archive.org, but with peer review by people who use it.
I'm sure that in principle it is possible. I mean, if you are interested in some domain you surely know few people who's opinion you'd trust. They might not even be Ph.Ds, but they somehow got this good reputation, probably not by accident. So if somebody like this presses "Like" button under some article and leaves comment about what is trustworthy here and what isn't, it probably will be as good (better, actually) for you, as opinion of Nature's staff. And as these people by definition are interested in this domain as well, chances are they also will be interested to read this article and thus will be able to press "Like" button and leave a comment.
So, yeah, in principle it it possible, but I imagine it is really hard to do it right. Because essentially it is the same as any "karma" or "rating" system on some forum, and inventing proper rating system is really hard — it's not the most knowledgeable people who usually have the highest rank on any thematic forum. But on forums and other existing social platforms it works, because rating isn't that important. And in our case it's all about rating and trust.
Re: Nature makes all articles free to view
#76My institution subscribes to Nature, and using my library's proxy to access the Nature website, I can use the "Share/bookmark" menu to generate links like http://rdcu.be/bKk4 , http://rdcu.be/bKlc , http://rdcu.be/bKld , and http://rdcu.be/bKli , which can be viewed in the browser (or maybe only because I also just installed the ReadCube app?). The articles linked to above span several months, but it's generating ser…
A trivial bookmarket or addon could strip their nonsense from the page. The examples you posted were all single page articles, though. Perhaps multiple pages are rendered on demand in a way that would be less trivial to strip.
Yes, I'm convinced that someone is already hacking away at this. Just look at the state of all eBook DRM being currently broken, and that's a much tougher nut to crack (and publishers have much higher financial gains at stake). Also, since no-one else has mentioned it: analog hole.
Re: Nature makes all articles free to view
#77Their definition of "free" is interesting. Only paid subscribers can search for articles, and apparently others can view articles only if subscribers share links with them. For many purposes, articles might be "free" but still hidden from the public.
Most searching for articles is done via PubMed. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
Nature gets seen side by side with free access journals there, and so now we get to see them for free (regardless of delivery mechanism). It likely doesn't matter what Hacker News thinks about this. Our impression of free, say github style open source free is otherworldly different than Nature's free: paywall, peer reviewed, exclusive, ultra prestige. Tomorrow there will be celebrations in my old lab about how amazing this is.
Re: Nature makes all articles free to view
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just checked this out, you do not have to install anything. From their website: "ReadCube Connect is an HTML5-powered interactive PDF viewer." I presume this update will please many people, because they can now see whether or not an article they're contemplating purchasing actually touches on desired areas or not. Good thinking on their part!
I just signed up for ReadCube, thinking this meant I could at least browse articles as a member of the general public. You have to install an app on your computer and log in to view articles and use it. ReadCube Connect seems to be a Scribd-esque way to embed articles on existing pages (like a news story), not a standalone app. You also need a link shared to you via a paid subscriber (or one of a bunch of news sites…
D'oh, can't edit to add a new observation: now that there are links shared in the comments here, it appears the webapp is in fact a thing and you're not required to install anything or log in to view the "enhanced" PDFs. But you need the webapp or the standalone app to view them.
Still requires those links in the first place though. I just get prompted to buy access if I use any of the pubmed/google scholar search functionality in the app. Blergh.
Re: Nature makes all articles free to view
#79For those not in the know, Nature is THE journal to be in if you want to be successful in bioscience. It is peer reviewed, fairly exclusive, and they generally only publish game changer style science. If you are in science, and you get a first author Nature paper, your ticket is punched and you are about to have a moderately successful career.
For all the nitpicking going on about the delivery method, searching, and it not being "enough", this will largely not matter to scientists. Articles are generally shared by DOI or PMID, indexing is very specific. If not, relevant papers in the field are nearly known by heart and new info from competing labs is checked on daily. Problems 1 and 2 are not as underserved as HN thinks.
This is a monster announcement for institutions that may not have the money for a Nature sub, and the public at large to have better access to such a powerful archive of historically hidden info. The fact that it's not delivered in a DRM-free format for every device ever all the way back to the oldest article is nothing compared to how incredibly huge this is. I am spamming this to all my old lab buddies as we speak.
TL;DR: The output system for academic publishing sucks at the high end, but it just got a lot less sucky.
Re: Nature makes all articles free to view
#80Key quote: "All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded." It sounds like: * you may have to install the ReadCube reader to view the protected PDFs, unclear if you can view them in a regular PDF viewer. ("ReadCube (...) will be used to host and display read-only versions of the articles' PDFs") * only subscrib…
I installed readcube for mac and the app was unable to connect to get the articles. Is anyone having such an issue?