Uploading and Downloading: Preventing what's up from being got down

[Stevan Harnad]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, malena wrote:

> Does anyone know if there is a technique or software that can prevent
> a document from being downloaded?

It is not clear to me that your query is appropriate for sigmetrics,
which is about measuring access and usage, not blocking it..

Nor is it at all clear why one would want to upload a document so that
it could not be downloaded! I'd say the surest way to prevent an article
from being downloaded is not to upload it onto the web in the first
place (just as the surest way to prevent plagiarism or misquotation is
not to publish one's text at all!).

Having said that, it *is* possible to upload an article into an
OAI-compliant Institutional Repository and to set access to its
bibliographic metadata as Open Access but access to its full-text as
Restricted Access of No Access, so it cannot be downloaded. The free
GNU Eprints software (and also soon the OS Dspace software) will allow
you to do that.  See:

https://secure.ecs.soton.ac.uk/notices/publicnotices.php?notice=902

Publishers have proprietary ways of blocking or hobbling access too.
See also Open Text Mining: http://hublog.hubmed.org/archives/001345.html

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html