TheWebConf articles and ACM URI dance: "free" and "Open Access"

The Official ACM demonstrates "free" and "Open Access":

TheWebConf links to peer-reviewed articles from:

https://www2018.thewebconf.org/proceedings/

where the target URLs are at acm.org.

When a human user navigates to one of the article URLs from that webpage eg:

https://dl.acm.org/authorize?N655043

it redirects to:

https://dl.acm.org/authorize.cfm?key=N655043

and they wait 10 seconds to be redirected to:

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3190000/3186960/p127-taelman.html?ip=84.72.1.173&id=3186960&acc=OPENTOC&key=4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4DD68F0663C025AA&__acm__=1525163409_90e4d5315b181d6e86be36180f6e54e9

Note my IP in URL. That URL has lifetime of abut 10 minutes. Returns
HTTP 403 afterwards.


Alternatively, fetching:

https://dl.acm.org/authorize?N655043

redirects to:

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3186960

Note that neither the HTML or the PDF representations are publicly
accessible (at the time of this writing). There is an access barrier ie.
one must either purchase the article or sign-in, or if connected through
a network (subscribing library/institution), then it can probably be
accessed.


Requesting the DOI URI:

https://doi.org/10.1145/3184558.3186960

redirects to:

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3184558.3186960

Same as above ie. no free/open representation publicly available.


The PDF/HTML representations used to hyperlink and point at something like:

https://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=3186960&ftid=1958645&dwn=1&CFID=28025596&CFTOKEN=214620b772eeb99d-7920D5E5-F234-2DAE-E26934C2F2C44CAA

which redirected to the delivery.acm.org URL as mentioned earlier.


Fetching without `User-Agent` header:

$ curl -iLk https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3184558.3186960

returns:

HTTP/2 403

"
403 Error - Access Forbidden

We are sorry ...

... but we have temporarily restricted your access to the Digital Library.
Your activity appears to be coming from some type of automated process.
To ensure the availability of the Digital Library we can not allow these
types of requests to continue.
The restriction will be removed automatically once this activity stops.
"


Super!



PS: Until ACM figures out AWWW, URI management, HTML,.. check this out
in the meantime:

https://rdfostrich.github.io/article-demo/

Archived:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180501085404/https://rdfostrich.github.io/article-demo/


-Sarven
http://csarven.ca/#i

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2018 09:17:03 UTC