Busted Link

Apparently the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) is pretty serious about not letting people read the ISSA journal for free - and even the single free "featured article" each month doesn't stay free for long.

Here's the scoop - the online journal is only available to members, but every month, the cover story is available for free to non-members, at the following address: www.issa.org/Downloads/Journal%20Feature.pdf. 

When a new issue is posted, a new article goes up at that exact same URL. The previous month's freebie is then only available to paying members. I'm not sure I follow the logic of that - once a digital file is available for free, suddenly limiting people's access to it is a big step backwards.

Anyway, as a person who authored one such cover story, I sent that URL along to several people (and posted it on my blog), thinking that the next month's feature would have its very own URL. Nope. The article I wrote is no longer at the URL I previously posted. Some other article is there instead.

Fortunately, someone posted the article on Scribd, so it's available here. 

My point: the genie is out of the bottle, ISSA. By only offering the latest feature article (and not an archive of all the previous feature articles), you're essentially taking yourself out of the loop. Scribd takes over as the distributor for ISSA's cover stories. Maybe that's deliberate, but it seems like a strange strategy.