Pre-publish sharing

[Bronson-Brown-deVost]

We should keep in mind that people may want to make pre-published editions viewable to non-registered users. This was requested by Asaf Gayer. Edition admins may always add another registered user as a read-only editor, thus giving making the edition accessible. This system, however, does not allow an editor to make such an edition visible to someone who is not registered.

If we want to allow publicly accessible links to editions that are not yet published (and may still be changed), we can add a flag for that purpose in the edition_table. The API would treat this flag in the same way it treats the public flag, when deciding whether or not data is publicly accessible.

Ingo suggests that conceptually we are talking about two things: one is whether an edition is publicly accessible or not, the other is whether its URIs are guaranteed to be stable or not (published editions provide stable URIs and thus are not allowed to change). Making unpublished editions publicly accessible would need to come with the caveat that none of the URIs are guaranteed to be stable, thus the edition is unsuitable for citation.

If we do allow sharing of unpublished editions to unregistered users, I would prefer not to implement any access restrictions, for instance by using a token on the URL or some other type of verification (I think that level of security is not necessary).

We have not made a decision on the recommendation yet.