Greetings, On Tuesday, November 26, 2002, at 08:27 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
Now it is conceivable that the eprints architecture can be slightly modified, so that the old, suppressed URL for the deleted paper automatically redirects to the new draft if someone tries to access the old one. That I have to let Chris reply about. Here I have merely explained the rationale for not having designed the archive so a paper could be deposited, and then modified willy-nilly under the same URL. For that would not have been an archive at all, and user complaints, about trying to use and cite a moving target, would have far out-numbered depositor complaints about what to do with after-thoughts and successive drafts.
Well, that is one way to look at it. On the other hand, arXiv.org uses version numbers and the persistent name/id and URL (say hep-th/0210311 and http://arXiv.org/abs/hep-th/0210311) always points to the latest version with links to the earlier versions. I believe you are advocating a poor design choice here. One cannot overemphasize the importance of human-friendly persistent names that are easily converted to URL's for linking and quick location. Patching the system to redirect to the latest linked version is a hack. Is one actually able to download the earlier version (which is what was cited)? Generally, a better approach is to give a good persistent name to a "work" and not a single manifestation of that work (whether it be a particular format or a particular version) and then give a reader a single point of entry into the system that can be bookmarked or cited reliably which gives a choice of what to download. Cutting off access to an earlier, citeable version is a mistake. Archives should not delete items or make them hard to access - rather they should show items in context and give easy access to an item's history and versioning with a single identifier for the work taken as a whole. Cheers, Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society
