Just print it to a PDF printer.
Science Memes
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I feel like this will cause quality degradation, like repeatedly re-compressing a jpeg. Relevant xkcd
Edit: though obviously for most use cases it shouldn't matter
I don't understand the "that's no how PDFs work" criticism.
Removing data from the original file is the whole point of the exercise! Of course unique tokens can be hidden in plain sight in images, letter spacing, etc. If we want to make sure to remove that we need to degrade the quality of the PDF so that this information is lost in said lossy conversion.
If the paper is worth it and does have an original not OCR-ed text layer, it'd better be exported as any other format. We don't call good things a PDF file, lol. It's clumsy, heavy, have unadjustable font size and useless empty borders, includes various limits and takes on DRM, and it's editing is usually done via paid software. This format shall die off.
The only reason academia needs that is strict references to exact page but it's not that hard to emulate. Upsides to that are overwhelming.
I had my couple of times properly digitalizing PDFs into e-books and text-processing formats, and it's a pain in the ass, but if I know it'd be read by someone but me, I'm okay with putting a bit more effort into it.
What format do you suggest?
FB2 is a known format for russian pirates, but it can and should be improved because it sucks ass in many things. FB3 was announced long ago but it hasn't got any traction yet.
EPUB is mor/e popular, so it's probably be the go to format for most books US and EU create, but it isn't much better.
Other than that, even Doc\Docx is better than PDF, but I'd recomend RTF for it has less traces of M$ bullshit, and while it's imperfect format, it's still better.
Purge metadata, convert PDF to rendered graphics (including bitmaps), add OCR layer.
If we build a decentralized system for paper publishing, like lemmy based on activitypub.. will it work?
Probably won't take off because scientists need reputable journals and not some random fediverse publishers.
Is it fucked up? Absolutely. But something else needs to be changed before this would be possible.
Also, why not ditch the concept of a "publisher" to begin with? Why not have a national or international article index, graded by the article level? It's not that we live in a paper era, and for those who still need it, we can always print.
Well, we could assign the reviewers more "significance" here. We could give them points and if they "upvote" a paper it gives the paper a bit more visibility/reputation. If the reviewer has actually reviewed the paper it gives the paper more points.
How much a reviewer is able to "spend" could be based on the reputation of the institution, their own papers in the same field and the points they get for their reviews by other users.
Just a raw idea,but it seems possible, indeed.
Can't we all researcher who is technically good at web servers start a opensource alternative to these paid services. I get that we need to publish to a renowned publisher, but we also decide together to publish to an alternative opensource option. This way the alternate opensource option also grows.
I mean a paper is renowned if many people cute from it
We could just try citing more free papers, whenever possible (as long as they still have peer review)
Like arxiv.org?
Does it have all the new research paper regarding medicine and pharmacological action and newer drug interactions and stuff?
I kind of assume this with any digital media. Games, music, ebooks, stock videos, whatever - embedding a tiny unique ID is very easy and can allow publishers to track down leakers/pirates.
Honestly, even though as a consumer I don't like it, I don't mind it that much. Doesn't seem right to take the extreme position of "publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things". There needs to be a balance.
Online phone-home DRM is a huge fuck no, but a benign little piece of metadata that doesn't interact with anything and can't be used to spy on me? Whatever, I can accept it.
Plus, if you have two people with legit access, you can pretty easily figure out what's going on and defeat it.
Definitely better than some of the DRM-riddled proprietary eBook formats.