Academic publications sit behind pay-walls, and to access papers, you need an approved IP address of your university, log in to your library, or pay online per article. One way or the other, you will be identified. Far more alarming is that even browsing through abstracts and obtaining citations are losing the option of anonymity. Some publishers require cookies to use their sites, others make Javascript mandatory to just export a citation, and, more recently, Tor exit nodes are being blocked. Academic publishers want your money and every last bit of data of your life.
In the following, I describe the results of a brief experiment with the publishers whose publications I access most often. The publishers in the test were Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, World Scientific (WS), IEEE, ACM, American Physical Society (APS), SIAM, Royal Society Publishing, Nature Publishing Group (NPG), Science/AAAS, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). I also included Google Scholar (GS), as unfortunately I use it frequently for finding citations.
Three IP addresses were used in different browser sessions: one ordinary address in Tokyo, one university IP address in Sweden, and a Tor exit node. I used a plain Firefox 32 under Linux with the non-Tor IP addresses, with the user agent manually set to "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0". The Tor Browser Bundle was version 3.6.4, the user agent string matched the other two browser sessions. All plugins were disabled, and all browser were fitted with NoScript, HTTPS-Everywhere, and Disconnect. The cookie and Javascript settings were modified, as the experiments required. When Javascript was enabled, it was temporarily enabled for the entire page. Third-party cookies were never enabled.
The purpose was not to access papers: only to obtain information about the papers. Hence I tested two functionalities: accessing the abstract page and exporting the citation to Bibtex. The procedure was to search for the title of a paper published by one of the listed publishers with Startpage. A click from there would take me to the abstract page. From there, I tried exporting the citation. With Google Scholar, the search took place in Google Scholar itself.
The Japanese and the Swedish IP addresses did not make a difference in the outcome, hence the two cases are not separated. The blocking of Tor exit nodes is inconsistent, hence the results may not be easy to reproduce. In any case, if Tor worked, exporting the Bibtex citation was also possible. The results are summarized in the following table.
| Abstract | Bibtex | ||||
| Cookies | Javascript | Tor | Cookies | Javascript | |
| Elsevier | No | Required | Blocked | No | Required |
| Springer | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Wiley | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| T&F | Required | No | Yes | Required | No |
| WS | Required | No | Yes | Required | Required |
| IEEE | No | No | Yes | Required | Required |
| ACM | No | No | Blocked | No | No |
| APS | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| SIAM | Required | No | Yes | Required | No |
| RSP | No | No | Blocked | No | No |
| NPG | No | No | Yes | N/A | N/A |
| AAAS | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| PNAS | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| GS | No | No | Blocked | No | Required |
Taylor & Francis requires cookies. A warning comes up if cookies are disabled, blocking you from further access. Among other nonsense, it says "To provide access without cookies would require the site to create a new session for every page you visit, which slows the system down to an unacceptable level." SIAM and World Scientific will tell you the exact same message.
The Javascript and the corresponding browser-fingerprinting fare worse. IEEE Xplore pretends you can export a citation without Javascript, but actually you cannot. IEEE wants both cookies and Javascript, and, as a matter of fact, it also requires access to addthis.com, only to export a citation. World Scientific also requires both cookies and Javascript for exporting Bibtex.
ScienceDirect makes extensive use of Javascript and accesses third-party sites, including many invasive trackers. Here is one more entertaining morsel of information of Elsevier's IT infrastructure: book manuscripts are uploaded through an unencrypted http interface. That is right, even the password goes out in the wild, without encryption. When I complained about it, the response was that the submission system was safe. Later I was provided an FTP access to address my complaints. I was flabbergasted. They spend serious money on stealing data from you through ScienceDirect, but they are incapable of moving the submission system to https. This is how much they care.
Not all Tor exit nodes are blocked systematically yet. I noticed that from certain exit nodes, Royal Society Publishing and ScienceDirect are blocked: the pages would not load. I imagine attacks are frequent from Tor exit nodes, and they choose the most brainless form of defence: block the IP address. Their profits are obviously not channelled towards hiring competent IT personnel. I am not surprised to see ACM on the list of blockers: they are sponsored by the NSA, they glorify the actions of the NSA by calling the employees `law-abiding dedicated patriots' in their flagship publication, their new spam filter is even more closely tied to Google, and they recently added tracking links to their newsletters. Blocking Tor exit nodes to access the digital library is the least they can do.
Going beyond publishers, searching for articles is also getting more painful. Google blocks searches from Tor exit nodes, that is nothing new. What is new is that Google Scholar updated its user interface a few days back. I relied on a trick to get the Bibtex reference for a paper without enabling Javascript: if any of the authors of the paper had a Google Scholar profile, finding the paper on the profile page allowed a Javascript-free export of the citation. This is gone. Now Javascript is mandatory even to look beyond the first page of papers on a profile. Also, there is no simple way to disable localization -- adding &hl=en to every URL is cumbersome. I speak neither Japanese nor Swedish, so using Google Scholar is a permanent pain. Can we just assume that academics who managed to get a PhD one way or the other can speak elementary English? Then we could forget about this localization madness. Reasons are getting stronger and stronger to abandon Google Scholar, but the alternatives still have serious shortcomings.
The most hilarious finding of this experiment is that Nature only exports citation to RIS format. It must be hard to provide a Bibtex option.
We all know that academic publishers are evil. Until now, they only wanted to cash in. They are going a step further and they are ramping up efforts to harvest data about you. For what? I prefer not knowing. Most of the major publishers are either based in Five Eyes countries, or have extensive operations there. Espionage is in their blood. The state of affairs is depressing as it is, and the situation is only getting worse.
