Continuing the discussion from Disable PDF Links/Bibliography Control:
I wanted to follow on that earlier thread that I still think the current approach to manually removing Paperpile references is suboptimal and in fact is dangerous.
It is not impossible that the author of the document forgets about doing this explicit export (especially since there is no clear indication in the document that references are linked, unless one does a mouse over). Once this happens and the document is “out in the wild”, there is no way to restrict access to the linked references (other than manually removing all linked references from Paperpile, I guess). As a result:
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it then becomes possible for the recipient of the document to learn the identity of the reference owner (real name is conveniently provided by Paperpile on the linked reference page!). Considering that many of the users in the Paperpile community are academics, this can reveal the identity of the author and create problems in the blinded review process.
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it is then even possible to Edit or Delete the linked reference that does not belong to the link recipient!
The screenshot below was taken for the linked bibliography item opened in “Incognito” mode:
How can this possibly be a feature?!! Makes absolutely no sense to me!
I’ve just realized that this very scenario happened to me, while working on a paper submission. Two of my previous submissions of the papers, which were supposed to be double-blinded, had links in the PDF document bibliography references that could be used to learn my name, because I did not realize this was a “feature” of Paperpile, and did not even think about exporting a clean copy! This motivated me to write this separate post/thread.
Not sure if the Paperpile folks want to address this (if they don’t, I think it is just a matter of time this can become a big problem), so Paperpile users - beware of this subtlety!
I would suggest to the Paperpile team to have a global setting that disables URLs in the bibliography list for all documents created, or ideally introduce granular control over who can access linked references on a per-document basis.