Earlier this week the Intartubes were boiling with the news that Nature Magazine would open its archives back to 1869. Which would, indeed, be marvelous and unexpected.

But it’s a little more complicated than that… it seems Nature’s publisher, Macmillan, is going to let paid Nature subscribers use (yet another) foredoomed-to-failure “read only sharable format”.

The content-sharing policy, which also applies to 48 other journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG) division, including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics, marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles.

That sounds pretty great for everybody, right? Win-win!

ReadCube, a software platform similar to Apple’s iTunes, will be used to host and display read-only versions of the articles’ PDFs. If the initiative becomes popular, it may also boost the prospects of the ReadCube platform, in which Macmillan has a majority investment.

Starting to sound a lot dodgier now… we may have a reality disconnect going on…
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Although the screen-view PDF cannot be printed, it can be annotated — which the publisher says will provide a way for scientists to collaborate by sharing their comments on manuscripts.

Yep, reality check sorely needed. Hey, look, smartphones have cameras!

ReadCube -> monitor screen -> camera phone -> email -> PC -> printer.

There are no formats that can be viewed but not printed. If you think such a thing exists, everything you’ve built is suspect, because you’re apparently not entirely aware of what’s going on around you. The odds are good that Macmillan’s “read only format” can be trivially defeated, and that script kiddy hacks will be available in short order.

Any questions?