From a March 31 AP story: 'A Canadian company has developed a system for businesses to track PDF documents in much the same way they can keep tabs on Web visits. Before, businesses could count the number of times documents were downloaded, but they had no way of knowing whether the files were passed around or even opened. With the service from Remote Approach, companies can insert a small programming script into documents using the popular Portable Document Format from Adobe Systems Inc. The script sends a message over the Internet with such details as the file name, the computer's Internet address and any unique identifier the company might have included. Remote Approach is also working on a feature that would let a company block a document from being read if there's no Internet connection.' For more details, see the Robyn Weisman story in PDF Zone.
(PS: As soon as publishers can remotely disable PDF's so that users can't read them offline from personal hard drives, then PDF's will be unsuitable for disseminating science and scholarship, whether through journals or repositories. They won't be suitable again until we have trustworthy tools for scrubbing them clean of the remote activation code.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/06/2005 09:41:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
