i didn’t expect openaccess, but … « Our line’s too short …

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i didn’t expect openaccess, but …

September 3, 2007 at 7:04 am | In library, openaccess, publishing | Leave a Comment

So while checking links programmatically, I came across http://npg.nature.com – the Nature Publishing Group’s portal. It’s a publisher, so you’d expect some interest in giving the public access. This is what i got:

--- request ---
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: npg.nature.com

--- response ---
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
content-length: 0
set-cookie: ...
server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
connection: close
location: http://npg.nature.com/index.html
date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:40:00 GMT
content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Ok. We’ll follow:

--- request ---
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: npg.nature.com

--- response ---
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
content-length: 292
set-cookie: ...
server: Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat)
connection: close
location: http://www.nature.com/npg
date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:39:56 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Ah. We’re still not there.

--- request ---
GET /npg HTTP/1.1
Host: www.nature.com

--- response ---
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
content-length: 0
set-cookie: ...
server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
connection: keep-alive
location: http://www.nature.com/npg/
date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:40:34 GMT
content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Forgot the damn trailing slash …

--- request ---
GET /npg/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.nature.com

--- response ---
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
content-length: 19547
set-cookie: ...
server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
connection: keep-alive
date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:40:35 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Oops.

Ok. They’re probably picky about user agents, cookies and so on. So let’s bring in the headers:

--- request ---
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: npg.nature.com
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20060601 Firefox/2.0.0.4 (Ubuntu-edgy)
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection: keep-alive

--- response ---
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
content-length: 0
set-cookie: BIGipServerJava=302055690.20480.0000; expires=Mon, 03-Sep-2007 06:57:02 GMT; server: Apache-Coconnection: close
location: http://npg.nature.com/index.html
date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:45:00 GMT
content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

--- request ---
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: npg.nature.com
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20060601 Firefox/2.0.0.4 (Ubuntu-edgy)
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://npg.nature.com
Cookie: BIGipServerJava=302055690.20480.0000; expires=Mon; 03-Sep-2007 06:57:02 GMT; path=/; JSESSIONID=80AC4030C76B7E28DFE67DC7C2BA5993; Path=/

--- response ---
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
content-length: 292
set-cookie: BIGipServerJava=302055690.20480.0000; expires=Mon, 03-Sep-2007 06:57:03 GMT; path=/
server: Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat)
connection: close
location: http://www.nature.com/npg
date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:45:01 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

--- request ---
GET /npg HTTP/1.1
Host: www.nature.com
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20060601 Firefox/2.0.0.4 (Ubuntu-edgy)
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://npg.nature.com/index.html
Cookie: BIGipServerJava=302055690.20480.0000; expires=Mon; 03-Sep-2007 06:57:03 GMT; path=/

--- response ---
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
content-length: 0
set-cookie: BIGipServerJava=302055690.20480.0000; expires=Mon, 03-Sep-2007 06:57:04 GMT; path=/
server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
connection: keep-alive
location: http://www.nature.com/npg/
date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:45:23 GMT
content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

--- request ---
GET /npg/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.nature.com
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20060601 Firefox/2.0.0.4 (Ubuntu-edgy)
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.nature.com/npg
Cookie: BIGipServerJava=302055690.20480.0000; expires=Mon; 03-Sep-2007 06:57:04 GMT; path=/

--- response ---
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
content-length: 19547
set-cookie: BIGipServerJava=302055690.20480.0000; expires=Mon, 03-Sep-2007 06:57:05 GMT; path=/
vary: Accept-Encoding
server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
connection: keep-alive
date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:45:25 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hm. Didn’t really help. But

content-length: 19547

seems pretty big for an error page. http://www.nature.com/npg/ looks fine in the browser, too. So checking the response headers firefox got

Response Headers - http://www.nature.com/npg/

Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:47:07 GMT
Content-Length: 19547
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Set-Cookie: BIGipServerJava=302055690.20480.0000; expires=Mon, 03-Sep-2007 06:58:47 GMT; path=/
404 Not Found

What is this supposed to be good for? I mean, as far as I know, you’ve got to actively do something in terms of server configuration to get this behaviour. This doesn’t inspire much confidence in Nature being ready for the web.