Greetings, On Monday, December 2, 2002, at 02:08 PM, J Adrian Pickering wrote:
If you follow Mark's solution you end up with the risk of people citing papers that don't contain the information they cite anymore.
Um, no. Please look at the URL that was given and download each of the versions. They are clearly stamped with a date and with a version number. It is possible to cite by version. But the important point is that all versions are accessible to a reader - the changes may or may not be significant, but the reader can decide that for themselves. In any case, this system has been in place at arXiv.org for about 6 years and it works very well (before that earlier versions were overwritten and that was undesirable - but even then, it wasn't a big problem in practice though there were some notable exceptions).
This is particularly likely when the matter being discussed is controversial. A citation strictly refers to a manifestation/version not the generic paper. If the person making the citation wishes to change the citation to a later version then that is *their* right. The link is *their* link, not the target's. If you have 'published' something then it is in the public domain and you must expect people to cite it (and that version).
You may cite a particular version of an arXiv.org e-print if you like (e.g. hep-th/0210311v2). It should be clear to a reader if some controversial tidbit was removed or changed in subsequent versions. Furthermore, one can see precisely when such change were made.
Regards the 'user' query, they need to be told not to submit so many versions i.e. *think* carefully before submission! This is a matter of policy and governs the degree of 'resistance' there is to making submissions. There needs to be some otherwise the quality level drop.
You miss a major benefit of posting to arXiv.org then - namely that papers are often updated shortly after posting to reflect the comments of people who have looked at the paper - whether it is correcting typos or adding new references or clarifying a point. It is precisely this ability and usage that makes putting e-prints on arXiv.org before formal peer-review desirable. So, in fact, contrary to what you claim, quality is improved by allowing for easy updates. Overzealous updating should indeed be discouraged however. Most papers don't get updated more than 2 or 3 times - they follow a pattern of an early replacement with changes reflecting direct reader comments and then a later replacement reflecting changes from a more formal peer-review process. Papers that are replaced more often than this are obviously suspect and readers know this. Cheers, Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society
