Dealing w/ Copying of Online Articles via Open Proxies?

Creosote asks: "Concerns about piracy are no longer just for the big commercial media outfits. JSTOR, one of the major repositories and distributors of online versions of scholarly journals, has been hit by crackers taking advantage of open proxy servers to download about 51,000 articles from 11 JSTOR journals. Even nonprofit academic publishers rely on income from publications to exist, so the spectre of large-scale unauthorized copying is legitimately scary to them. In a letter to librarians and publishers, the president of JSTOR notes that while the "threat of open proxies has been recognized for some time in the web community...it does not appear that network administrators, librarians, or content providers are aware that organized efforts are being employed to gain unauthorized access to restricted campus resources" through them. I work for a nonprofit publisher (a university press) that will soon be making peer-reviewed digital projects available online, and they can't all be given away for free, so this hits close to home. Are there better solutions than turning into an attack dog, ala the RIAA and the MPAA?"

Comments

Idea for alternate academic peer review...

[Syntari]

I wonder if they could shift to a slashdot-type system... Post an article, then let any accredited reader moderate it. Initially, set moderation strength based on number of articles the particular reader has published in the relevant journals (weighting them for prestige of the journal)... after that, set moderation strength according to karma, which you get by posting an article and having it moderated upwards.

One can imagine various enrichments to this model (e.g., allowing a reviewer to go back and change his opinion of the article if he finds he cannot replicate the results in his laboratory), but I think you get the basic idea. Having everything in the open domain will indeed shut down the revenue for academic journals, but that doesn't mean that the time-honored system of peer review has to go down the drain, it just needs to be updated.

(Note: Reviewers who haven't yet published anything, and who do not have tenure at a recognized academic institution, will be awarded zero moderation strength; this is still a closed system for academics, even though it is based on openness. The usual disclaimers for strength of encryption - to ensure no impersonations - apply.)

Re:Perhaps this is the first chink . . .

[reallocate]

How do you know that someone has already "paid for" the papers? Seems to me that charging a fee for a paper is a good way of acquiring revenue to keep the operation going.

And, yes, anyone with access to a web server can publish, but I certainly wouldn't want my papers "peer" reviewed by an amorphous mob of unknown readers. Consider the puerile banalties that pass for comments here on Slashdot.