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posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday December 03 2014, @10:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the right-to-read dept.

Nature has made all research papers it publishes free to view. However there's a catch:

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, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December.

The "proprietary screen-view format" appears to be ReadCube, a Windows/Mac/iOS application.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2014, @11:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2014, @11:29AM (#122198)

    Keyboards have a "PrntScrn" key.

    Good luck with that analogue hole known as the "screen". What I don't understand is why they spent time, money and effort on doing something ultimately useless.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 03 2014, @12:24PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 03 2014, @12:24PM (#122205)

      Once enough of "your" stuff is on pirate bay, the best move is to make it slightly inconvenient to copy, because there's at least a chance of upselling, but if you make it really inconvenient they just go full on pirate bay.

      I'm using "pirate bay" as an analogy for asking a colleague who subscribes for a copy, not just one file sharing site.

      The same game is played by publishers of ebooks and music. Infuriate you and they lose all chance of future sales, mildly inconvenience you and you'll hang around and maybe even pay for it some day, maybe.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday December 03 2014, @08:42PM

      by frojack (1554) on Wednesday December 03 2014, @08:42PM (#122387) Journal

      they spent time, money and effort on doing something ultimately useless.

      But when the article is handed out in spoon sized bites it becomes a huge pain in the ass just to get a print of each tiny page full of info. I rather suspect the whole document is never actually on your machine at any one time, and it calls home each time you click the mouse or any key stroke. (And for the record, it isn't hard to intercept a printscreen request in window API calls.).

      I'll probably install this free reader app in a virtual machine, that way I can take a snapshot of the machine first so as to be able to avoid all the crapware and back doors it might have. That way I can play with it a bit.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2014, @11:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2014, @11:32AM (#122200)
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2014, @11:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2014, @11:57AM (#122203)

    I wonder how the data that isn't downloadable reaches the client to be displayable? Oh...

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday December 03 2014, @08:32PM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday December 03 2014, @08:32PM (#122386) Journal

    Subscribers to 49 journals on nature.com can now legitimately and conveniently share the full-text of articles of interest with colleagues who do not have a subscription via a shareable web link on nature.com. In addition, Macmillan Science and Education will take a lead on opening up public engagement with scientific knowledge to society at large by giving access to the same content to readers of 100 global media outlets and blogs.

    So as long as you got your link from some subscriber of one of the blessed 100 outlets you MIGHT be able to read the research. No Linux users need apply.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 1) by GoddersUK on Thursday December 04 2014, @08:13AM

      by GoddersUK (4835) on Thursday December 04 2014, @08:13AM (#122492)

      No Linux users need apply.

      Actually this read cube thing is browser based (I read there's a downloadable version too, but you can use it with just a browser) so it should be Linux friendly (not tried it on Linux myself, I try and avoid it [ReadCube, not Linux]). It (or clones of it) have become rather popular with academic publishers these days, nobody I know uses them though (deliberately, at least - when they were new I did watch several colleagues get rather confused as to why their "PDF" wasn't normal).

      I find it rather sweet that they think scientists will use their neutered URL to share papers with colleagues who don't have access, though. Standard practice in the academic world is just to email the PDF.