Hi Lesley,

Yes, we've just had reports of similar problems accessing Wiley InterScience
here at Sheffield. Altering the privacy settings, along the lines you caution
against, clears the problem.

 Cookie Privacy has been something of a hot potato over the past few years. In
general, the debate has centered around the notion of the (mis-)management of
so-called 'personal identifiers' exchanged between a user's computer (or proxy)
and a web server (providing a service). The ability to monitor browsing habits
and link habits to individuals was what first raised some people's fears.

Although there are some instances when third party cookie usage can bring
such unwanted 'intrusions', this is not an acute problem, and certainly I am
unaware of nuisances in the context of cookie-usage in subscription-paid e-
journal services. Generally the information exchanged in cookies relates
primarily to session-specific uses; being able to remember who did what when;
it brings some specificity to the stateless nature of online transactions.
 Even here, the 'who' would not be personal in the traditional sense, unless you
were prompted for such information.

Of course, the ethical dimension is paramount, and this is something which
individual e-journal service providers should be able to negotiate with their
users. Admittedly there will always be some unscrupulous companies on the
web at large, but most companies take their data protection obligations
seriously (the situation is somewhat more acute in the USA with the current
political climate).

That said, constant tweaking of IE browser privacy settings to enable e-journal
access is undesirable and difficult to realise across large managed networks
with a diverse student body.

I'd be interested to hear what kind of response you get from MIMAS/Wiley
themselves on this issue.

A comprehensive overview of cookies, their development and the polemics of
their current use is found in David M Kristol's article 'HTTP Cookies: Standards,
Privacy, and Politics', ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 1(2), Nov.
2001, pp.151-198
[DOI:10.1145/502152.502153]

Cheers

Chris


>
> We are having problems with our privacy settings (IE6 Medium/High), which
> are affecting our access to the full text of Blackwell Publishing and Wiley
> InterScience journals when using the Web of Science at MIMAS. Other
> publishers e.g. ScienceDirect, Taylor and Francis, and Nature Publishing
> Group allow access to the full text of their journals using our current
> privacy settings (IE6 Medium/High). Medium or higher security settings give
> the same result. We would have to change the settings to Low in order to get
> full text access through the Web of Science at MIMAS to Wiley InterScience
> and Blackwell Publishing titles, but we don't feel that we should have to
> set the security settings so low in order to deal with this problem.
>
> Has anyone else out there experienced the same problem?
>
> Cheers
> Lesley
>
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Lesley Crawshaw, Faculty Information Consultant,
> University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB UK

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