Metacat

It's easiest to describe this by documenting the steps to reproduce. This involves ESA, but I haven't checked whether it happens with non-public documents viewed using other registries.

After logging into ESA, click My Submissions (or View Submissions if logged in as a moderator), then click to view any one of the listed documents. Note that these are all documents that are not publicly readable, but should be readable by the logged-in user. The Data Set Citation section near the top of the document contains a link that refers to the document itself, e.g.: http://esa-dev.nceas.ucsb.edu/esa/metacat/esa.65.3/esa

Clicking on the link produces an error:

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This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

<error>
User public does not have permission to read the document with the docid esa.65.3
</error>
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The underlying URL for the example above is:
http://esa-dev.nceas.ucsb.edu/esa/metacat?action=read&qformat=esa&sessionid=&docid=esa.65.3

Perhaps the issue is the missing session variable?