eprints_tech messages

From: "Minh Thu" <minh-thu.nguyen AT polymtl.ca>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:47:26 -0400

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Hello Tim,

Thanks for your answer. I was really talking about password protect the
files for modification/copy, not for it's opening. Do you think all of the
problems you quoted prevail ? 

I can certainly see that "It prevents legitimate scholarly use (e.g.
quotation)" because of the copy protection (which can be lifted
independently), but I would like to understand more about indexing, meta
analysis, plagiarism detection and digital preservation, could you elaborate
them for me ? 

For sure, I can see that while we can think about protecting theses &
dissertations, we cannot dream of doing the same for articles which are
freely deposited by their authors, so maybe it is not justified anyway.

Thanks.

Minh-Thu


-----Message d'origine-----
De : Tim Brody [mailto:tdb2 AT ecs.soton.ac.uk] 
Envoyé : 11 03 2009 07:02
À : eprints-tech AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
Objet : [EP-tech] Re: Thesis : Locking PDF files or not ?

http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/eprints-tech
*** EPrints community wiki - http://wiki.eprints.org/
On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 15:55 -0400, Minh Thu wrote:
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/eprints-tech
> *** EPrints community wiki - http://wiki.eprints.org/
> Hi all,
> 
> We are in a situation where department staff deposit all theses, not
> students. We do ask students not to password lock their files, however we
> are going to ask staff to lock these files (by the same password).
> 
> What are your thoughts as to whether we should lock PDF documents or not
to
> prevent modifications & copy ?

I would argue against adding security settings to PDFs for the following
reasons:
 - It doesn't protect you against determined abuse i.e. any
password-protected file can be cracked with the appropriate tools
 - It will prevent the PDF being indexed by EPrints and other search
engines
 - It prevents legitimate scholarly use (e.g. quotation)
 - It prevents meta-analysis
 - It hinders plagiarism detection
 - It hinders digital preservation

(+ all the other potential interesting uses that no one has thought of
yet)

All the best,
Tim.