15 - Protecting your Papers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2021
Summary
There are a number of reasons to protect the content of your papers. Possible motives are commercial interest, or protecting first discovery claim.
Reasons
Commercial reasons
You want to make money out of your paper and do not want unauthorized copying. For scientists these commercial reasons are usually not relevant. It hardly ever occurs that a scientist makes money on a scientific paper. It is indeed against the culture of science.
First discovery
If your manuscript gets published in an official journal or accepted by a digital archive, your first-discovery claim is assured.
But what if, for instance, you only want to publish it on a website? This could be relevant for didactic papers, tutorials, lecture notes, and presentations. You might want to prevent people from copying your site. You want to ward off evil colleagues to republish your manuscript under their own name.
How do you avoid abuse of your unofficially published material?
Protection solutions
Regular publications
If you publish your paper in a regular journal, that itself is the protection. In that case reuse and abuse of your text and figures can not be prevented. Any scientist can go to the website of your publisher, copy your figures and use them. Publishers are very bad at protecting your files. It is not really in their interest.
Watermarks
Watermark protection is weak, but it warns innocent users who are about to become abusers. A hacker will be able to remove any watermark, but it does require some expertise.
You can make life more difficult for a hacker by merging watermarks as a figure with the background.
As an illustration: you can superimpose a very large, almost transparent, diagonal text with “NOT TO BE COPIED: <YOUR NAME>”. Merge the text as a figure. Then try yourself to remove the watermark with the reading/editing program you expect the abuser will use (for instance Adobe Acrobat). This will tell you how difficult it is.
MS-Word documents
Papers being distributed as MS-Word files cannot be protected. Period. All the password stuff in it is just frills. Any evil hacker can simple copy your paper and change it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Survival Guide for ScientistsWriting - Presentation - Email, pp. 111 - 113Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2009